Fun, but light on features.

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.

GPropel about Cathode