Nice visual effects, hopelessly poor terminal emulation

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.

kozlowc about Cathode