Cathode App Reviews

This is a Great emulator for those guys who used the CRT in the 80s. Plenty of options, now you can get the screen youve dreamed of but had no way to possess. It used to be $25+ app but now they have corrected the price and it’s a must have! PS: If you want tabs/splits or whatever fancy features you best bet is iTerm anyway PPS: Author, get at least 2x2 split screen working and it’s gonna rock! %) Best wishes

There’s no denying the cool factor of this app - or the nostalgia aspect of it. But coolness and nostalgia aside, it’s impractical. The special effects make the screen look cool, but they also make reading difficult - you’ll find yourself increasing the font size to improve readability. And once you do that, the amount of text that can fit on the screen is severely reduced.

the "scan-lines » effect is not viewable on macbook 13’ non-retina !!! need to up scale to maximum to see the scan lines

Cathode provides a fun and entertaining terminal that’s fully functional, and that also doubles as a plain text editor. Handling the display settings can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning, but that’s because Cathode is very flexible. Just something I missed: Being able to select the bold version of system fonts, such as Monaco.

The only thing missing is the possibility to use fonts with powerline and other unicode charactere icons.

Ever wanted that Matrix-Look on your rig? Here you got it :)

A real trip down memory lane! Lots of fun! Plus, once you finish playing with it I actually like using it for normal work!

Ok so I needed to find a good Terminal emulator for the Mac that was similar to PuTTY on the PC. Cathode is visually stunning, I’ll give it that. However, its inability to capture a log of the screen output, and inability to connect to SSH make this a very expensive eye candy with no real functionality to a Network Admin. Please add the capability to log screen output to a file, and SSH support would be a nice bonus. Also because of the graphics quality, your machine will work a lot harder to render the software, keep this in mind if using it for system administration tasks.

Cathode is visually stunning, with a wide range of options to let you customize your terminal experience to exactly the way your twelve your old self remembers it. Everyone I know who sees it reacts with glee to the memories it brings. I’d love to use it as my main terminal emulator, but it’s got some issues that make doing that difficult. Screen clearning is clunky, and your often left with artefacts and random text that wasn’t cleared properly by the terminal when connecting to SSH. Many advanced features are missing, such as log output and tabbing. Still, it’s fun to use and the visuals are stunning. All you need is a IBM mechanical keyboard and your all set for a trip down memory lane.

Like the other reviews, please add the ability to SSH and use this like a normal terminal. Also, as an option that would be VERY cool - for the reflection it’s nice that you can take a picture with the webcam, but it would be even neater if you could display a realtime video reflection using the video feed of the camera.

This is great. Can we get tabs, please?

This app is fantastic. It’s quite simple to dial in the exact retro look you’re after. There’s no built-in support for tabs, but you can use tmux sessions to the same effect. Not sure why everyone is clamoring for SSH support; you’re on a Mac, this is a local terminal emulator, just use the built-in command-line OpenSSH client.

I was really expecting to be able to use this as my SSH client like I do on the iPad/iphone… mainly because thats how I use the iPad/iPhone version. Admittedly I can get by without it, but I really would like to be able to use it as an SSH client, with it storing host/username/password as it does on the iPhone/iPad.

Мне нравится то, что в таком красивом терминале появляется всё больше функционала для серьёзной работы. Это приложение стало основным терминалом в моей работе. Очень красивая графика, хороший функционал, гораздо более приятная работа и гибкая настройка терминала под себя. Я хотел бы попросить Вас реализовать возможность запуска терминальных команд через AppleScript по аналогии с системным терминалом. Хотя бы функцию «do script». Посмотрите скрипт ниже: I really like that so nice terminal app enhances its functions for serious work. It become my main terminal in work. Amazing graphics, powerful functions, it’s a pleasure to work with that and it’s so customizable. I want to ask you to make it possible to run terminal scripts via AppleScript just like original Terminal. At least «do script» function. See the example script: tell application "Cathode" do script "ls -l" end tell You can actually do it with "Terminal" application. I wish you to enhance more useful functions for hardcore terminal users.

Really fun throwback with all sorts of ways to customize the display. Several nice details are included. For example, the text reflects off the "border" of the "monitor" - so when you have more text the border glows with the text color, etc. Id only have two complaints: - I wish more text size options were available. On my 27" iMac, caping the text size at 10 or 20pt (depending on the font) doesnt make sense. Also, on the large screen its hard to see the "interlace" option (which is easily visible on my 13" MacBook Pro). - The price is a bit high for an app that isnt exactly making me more productive or giving me any time-saving features. Even many games cost less than the $10 asking price. There is a trial version on the vendors website for anyone wanting to check out the app before they purchase.

Alright, some background: I have been developing this thing called code for 34 years, every single day - except for some 40 days in total - and I have seen screens and standards come, and quite quickly, go. I no longer drool at EGA. But, at this I do. Drool, that is; it brings me back to the cradle, when life was simple: get up, pretend to partake in the life outside the computer and then run home to turn on that prompt. Ah, the sounds; the curvature; the often failed attempts to solder mysterious color chips to a motherboard just to revert back to the green or yellow friendly characters, or even HIRES! And, the problem (with my brain) is that it is not only nostalgia, but I *truly* use this terminal for coding at times; it sparkles some neurons (or at least synapses) that have been dormant for a few decades, as I have transitioned from Applesoft Basic and Pascal to Node.js and Haskell.

Make no mistake: the effects that this app offers, and the customizability of it all that it offers you, is outstanding. You can recreate just about any system you have ever owned, going back decades, and tune it exactly to your liking. They are very well done. However, I cannot ignore the fact that, when it comes to actually using this as a terminal, the features just arent there. The Preferences window illustrates this well: nearly every single option in the window, under every tab, is directly related to customizing the interface. Thats great and all, but for someone to really be productive on this, more features are, if not needed, greatly appreciated. Off the top of my head I would love the ability to have a custom preset that runs a command, say a cd command pointing to a directory I work in frequently, right when the window opens, automatically. Terminal.app does this, and its a huge time saver in the aggregate. There is also, as far as I can tell, no way to scroll back through your command history like you can in Terminal.app by holding control and using the arrow keys. This is another feature that isnt very advanced or anything, but that I use very, very frequently and that saves me untold amounts of time. This is a nice looking app that cosmetically gives the user a great deal of power, and to that end it is polished. I just wish it had more features for actual productivity. As it is now I have a hard time justifying a $10 pricetag on something that reduces how much work I can do, and how easily I can do it, as a compromise for looking nicer.

How awesome is it to be sitting in a coffee shop with a MacBook Air but have it look like your screen is a vintage terminal?! I love using this App when I ssh into a remote computer. It brings be back to my college days. Once you are through with the initial nostalgia, go into preferences and change the font size to "fluid", bump the speed to 10.0 Mbps, decrease the retrace, and enjoy your new shell. If you work in Terminal and you are older than 35 you NEED this app. If not, buy it anyway so the developers have more money to add features for me.

I am a graduate student who works with people that used 300 bps modems and shared mainframe time at government installations. They cannot stop smiling when they see this app. The screenshots, while impressive, are no substitute for seeing it in action. A demo is available from the developers website that you should try if youre on the fence. When you use this app, "phosphors" "persist." The emulated CRT distortion effects are a hoot. There are sound effects for entering text and scrolling, and the sheer number of presets for tweaking the screen output (fully customizable) is extremely entertaining. Unfortunately, it doesnt remember your settings upon relaunch.

Its not just a novelty, its actually useable! And I accidentally typed catalog, its that good! (For you youngns, catalog was the ls command in AppleDOS and ProDOS.) Minus one star for not supporting tabs, forgetting dimensions when in fluid mode, and not having a WOPR theme built in.