Cathode App Reviews

Using this terminal takes me way back to my BBS days in the 80s. Its a total gas and tons of fun. The only thing keeping me from making this a five star review is the lack of ANSI support. Everything else is so spot on, its a shame that this critical piece is missing.

Sure, the built in Terminal.app does everything that Cathode does and more. Functional, yes. Fun? No. Cathode is a working work of art. The retro look of the old CRTs is nostalgic of course, but the gentle glow of the pseudo-phoshor is actually easier on the eyes, IMHO. The fonts and special effects are top-notch, to the point where it looks like you’re watching a video feed of an actual CRT. I love having a virtual 1970s Apple II monitor for 2010s real world work.

With the addition of some tabs, perhaps rendered on the CRT surface as a solid color, it would totally replace OSX terminal.

This is a really fun terminal emulator with lots of control over just what version of the 1970s or 1980s youd like to live in. The one feature I need for this to replace ITerm2 is the ability for the "Command" key to serve as Meta for emacs. As it stands, you can make option serve as meta, but not Command.

As a software engineer who started programming back in the early 80s, this is awesome! This is such a cool little app and brings back so many memories of the “good old days” of command line coding and flickery monitors. Absolutely brilliant concept, perfectly executed.

The visual effects can be quite pretty if you twiddle with the settings a bit. I use this mostly to launch the vim text editor. One fun thing to do is install the twitvim plugin, and then use Cathode as your twitter client. Not too shabby!

By default this terminal will take you back to the ’80’s but if you turn off all the effects you can get a modern terminal too! I love that setting the rendering quality to high makes the monitor more realistically 80’s :). 30 frames per second of smooth scanline bliss.

This is a gorgeous terminal that is very fun to use, and it works great with ZSH. I’d really like to switch over to it permanently, but it’s missing a couple of features for me to do that. First, and this is a big one, it really needs UTF-8 support. Even fonts that have UTF-8 support (like Inconsolata or Source Code Pro) don’t show those characters in the terminal, so it seems to be a limitation of the program rather than the fonts that come with it. Second, it would be very nice to have split-window support like iTerm 2. I’m going to try setting up tmux in the meantime, but I’m not even sure it will work with Cathode (tmux-powerline definitely won’t work until there’s UTF-8 support). For now, I just have to snap my Terminal windows to the corners, but it would be pretty excellent to be able to go full screen with split windows. Anyway, if you don’t need those things, this is a freakin awesome terminal.

Using a terminal isn’t the most exciting thing in a modern operating system. Cathode changes that. It makes using a terminal application fun. Plus, I like the nostalia of using an old CRT late at night. Can you live without Cathode? Sure. By why? Modern computers have enough cycles to spare to add a little flair to tasks that are ordinarly too boring already.

i was expecting meh a simple gimmick in a single theme but the creators really carved out a ton of things i loved the moment i started up. If i saw a video i would have been sold before reading the positive reviews. the sound effects on updates and the refresh delay has me cracking up right now. i love the extra little details for reflections here and there…genius. this is fun and i just wish i had my mac at work to freak people out, if its on linux as well then ill buy for there too just to see others faces as they walk buy. let the scripting begin..

If you spend any amount of time on the terminal on a Mac, get this. Makes it all much more fun.

This is a great Terminal application and is my go-to on both OS X and iOS devices. The only minor complaint I have is that I cannot easily import and export profiles to other devices. It would be great if I could export a certain theme and share it between all devices, especially if it was via iCloud.

App looks cool and kicks the nostalga into high-gear. I grew up on old atari, c64 and mainframe terminals and this program can replicate all of them pretty faithfully. I am only giving it 4 stars because the while you can configure the border of the tube inside the monitor, you cannot configure the distance of the terminal text from the border itself. All text gets shoved to the edges of this virtual tube and I just want one more slider to change this.

The visual effects are nice and the author did a decent job here. A lot of the built-in presets are too distorted and/or annoying to be usable, but the C64 and 286 modes are solidly done and made me smile. The problem is that the terminal emulation is extremely bad. The program only offers “xterm”, “xterm-color”, and “xterm-color-256” as emulation choices, all of which should work and are fine with other terminals and the built-in terminal app, but not with Cathode. Something as basic as vi does not work. Logging into my Mikrotik router causes only the first line of the terminal to be rendered. That makes Cathode nothing more than a parlor trick, and as such I feel tricked indeed into spending five bucks on something I was hoping would be a usable terminal program.

Totally superfluous, but way too much fun not to use. Love it. If you must use CLI, at least reminisce whilst doing so.

Lots of fun! Needs a couple things IMO to be perfect. 1. the vintage terinal sits underneath a vanilla modern title bar. Should have some sort of vintage title bar as well to complete the effect. Dont know if thats possible in OSX but no excuses! Make it happen! Do the impossible! 2. I would love to have multiple tabs of this thingy to do more stuffs at the same time. And if you did multiple tabs with a vintage look ... now thats style!

This app is just perfect! If youre a dev who loves retro nostalgia (or just want a different style of terminal for a change), Cathode is a must-have. It features 10 different types of schemes and 14 types of monitor types from the 70s and 80s, as well as many different types of effects to let your terminal sound as though its booting up from the appropriate era. The monitor filters even allow you to choose flickering patterns and density, so you can decide if you want to fully emulate something that old, or just play with a little bit and still retain a more modern feel. I customized mine to look as much like the Pip-Boy from Fallout 4 as possible. I was getting pretty bored of staring at my terminal all day and not having a whole lot to choose from, and Cathode has made it fun again. For $4.99, the price is worth it!

This is an amazing terminal app, I enjoy all the tuning options to make the terminal look like an old machine. However, something very important in term of productivity is missing, TABS as in the usual mac terminal. I usually open around 4 terminal windows, two for text editing in VI, another another for running code, and another one for logging in a much powerful computer etc. One you’re used to work on the terminal, you need more than one and opening them in tabs saves time and window cluttering. Please add tabs and I’ll give you the 5 stars this app deserves, this is an essential option.

Great fun to use. I only wish that unicode font rendering wasn’t broken so existing programs would run fine, but you can’t have everything I guess.

Pretty cool.