

Cathode: A terminal app for mac that looks really cool - blktiger
http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/id499233976?mt=12&affId=403761

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laconian
$10? It might be a fun trick to show off to friends, but I am sure as _hell_
not doing any serious work in that.

iTerm2 'till I die!

~~~
batista
A fun trick? Are you kidding me? I've never spend money that fast before (I
had bought it before it got in the App Store).

Cathode is awesome, especially if, like me, you have ever worked in such an
environment (VT100 etc). I even dropped iTerm 2 and use Cathode all day long.
Something about the blast-from-the-past feel makes me more productive and feel
like an ol' hacker.

Only wish it had tabs.

~~~
there
Old VTs are cheap on eBay and are fun to play with.

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/6854396657/light...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/6854396657/lightbox/)

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dekz
Is that a HHKB? If so how are you liking it?

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noisebleed
I'm surprised to see so many complaints about the price. I was happy to pay
$10 just to reward the effort for such an impressively geeky toy when it first
showed up a year ago, even though I've never used it for real work.

I _will_ be complaining if the developers only support the App Store version
now though.

edit: I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of not being able to play
around with it before buying. I wouldn't have based on three screenshots and a
one-sentence description. As gammarator mentioned above, there's a free
version on the developer's site that's well worth checking out. The granular
control of the effects and overall attention to detail is really cool.

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gammarator
You can download a free version (with some effects locked) from the Secret
Geometry web store: <http://store.secretgeometry.com/download.php?id=7>

<http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/>

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ralphleon
It's a neat toy, but is pretty much useless for real work when compared to
apple's built-in terminal. Seems to not correctly support PS1s, at least in
the case of zsh. I'd be surprised by anyone that would actually pay $10 for
this, seems like $1 would be a better price point for a toy app.

~~~
dfc
You just used "real work" in the same sentence as "osx built in terminal"? Has
Apple made a lot of fixes to terminal recently?

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pjscott
To elaborate on this: iTerm2 is much better than Terminal.app, and free. It
seems to be the default thing that everybody recommends, and for good reason.

<http://www.iterm2.com/>

~~~
Void_
Now I'm interested. Why is it better? I use terminal only to navigate and run
commands, no Vim or Emacs. How will iTerm make my life better?

~~~
shaka881
It doesn't randomly barf terminal control sequences into the top of your Emacs
buffers, for one. ;) I've lost count of how many times I broke my build
because of something like "]24;" being inserted into the head of my source
files.

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rubberbandage
I’ve been using this since about version 0.93 and the developer has done a
great job with each new update. I’m thrilled to see it on the App Store and
with good publicity. I started using because I wanted an authentic terminal
experience for hacking around—the slight fuzziness of edges, the phosphor glow
when the contrast is turned up too high, the ability to simulate a 1200bps
connection—I find it much more captivating than perfect crisp black on white
9-point monaco.

That said, it still has bugs—the game of Life in emacs, for example, totally
screws up the screen buffer, and it lacks several functions; shift-home/end to
go to the start/end of the command line, and key repeat, to name a couple (and
it drives me _crazy_ every time I try to use them in vain). Overall though
it’s a great throwback, and conversation starter (really!) and it’s $10 I’ve
had no regrets in spending.

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scott_s
Cute, but it emulates the warping that I _hated_ in CRTs. I used to waste too
much time tweaking my CRT monitors to find the minimal amount of distortion
possible. I _love_ modern screens because of this.

~~~
batista
Everything is adjustable. You can emulate and finetune only the artifacts you
_did_ love from displays of old.

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nlmoreaux
= GLTerminal, from 2002: <http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/>

~~~
Hemospectrum
Cathode was made as a third party replacement for GLTerminal. The original was
never finished and had lots of horrible bugs, and the author never even
released it to the public and (IIRC) had no idea how it wound up on the
internet.

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sbierwagen
c.f [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-
emu...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emulator/)

tl;dr: The xscreensaver package has a program that does something very like
this. It's open-source, and works on both linux and OS X.

~~~
shaka881
Nice. Works on Ubuntu, and it's free. I got my jollies for a couple minutes,
realized how much I prefer readable text and smaller but legible font sizes,
and closed it.

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Nikkau
Just remind me <http://jstn.cc/post/8692501831> story.

I want one.

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sbochins
Is $10 the standard rate for a gimmicky kind of app like this on the mac
store? Seems a bit high to me, but I'm not an expert.

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amplifiedrhythm
Cool, but definitely not worth $10

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th0ma5
Reminds me of the CRT simulator for Stella
<http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml>

~~~
joezydeco
MAME does it too, right?

~~~
th0ma5
oh! i hadn't been paying attention. thank you!
<http://mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0145.txt>

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robinduckett
What this needs is a web cam bit to emulate the reflection. Currently you can
take a photo of yourself but it's just not good enough :P

~~~
noisebleed
Agreed, that would be awesome.. though just the fact that the angle of the
reflection changes as you move the window around was the 'shut up and take my
money' moment for me.

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un1xl0ser
If you are a hardcore terminal user, then you will run into layout bugs at
this stage. I'm interested enough in why this is the case, what exactly had to
be written from scratch. There must be some terminal emulators out there under
both GPL and BSD licenses.

I run into problems using mutt, vi and pagers, so I find myself pressing
Control-L a lot. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. This doesn't really
bother me.

I enjoy being in this terminal. The effects at low volume and to taste can be
soothing when you take a break and look at something, watching something
compile. I don't like "perfect" text or printing that you can achieve with
modern computers.

At the moment, I can't use this for e-mail (I bought it on Friday). I'll see
how coding goes. Command line editing has so far been bearable.

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Dejital
Performance is poor on my Macbook Pro 17in (late 2010) in full screen. Looks
great sized down, and I would love to play around with it, but it seems best
suited for full screen. ;)

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Bud
What, didn't everyone else get an actual vt100 from college surplus for $5 and
keep it running?

~~~
shaka881
I don't know why, but this has a strange allure to me...

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hcarvalhoalves
Cool app! Just not too much to my MacBook, 5 mins and it runs too hot. But
it's a neat trick.

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draggnar
Saw the design and went "o0o0o!" then saw the price and went "aww..."

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zokier
While not nearly as comprehensive, using VT220 font[1] is kinda cool too.

[1] <http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/>

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8ig8
Aside: These iTunes links don't work when reading from an iPad or iPhone. It
would be helpful if Mobile Safari could redirect to the publisher's website.

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abecedarius
Is there a CRT-like terminal for Javascript/HTML? I was just wishing for one
to use in a project the other day, but not enough to tackle it myself.

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fionabunny
Very cool! Is there a Windows equivalent?

~~~
cshesse
On windows, I use this program: <http://hackertyper.net/132892717764>

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Karunamon
Count me squarely in the "I would buy this if it wasn't $10" camp. It's nifty,
but that's about it.

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mdonahoe
This thing makes my GPU hot.

