Cathode
By Secret Geometry
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Description
Vintage Terminal
Fully Featured:
- Fast and Accurate Emulation
- Dynamic Scrollback Buffer
- 256 Colors
- Unicode*
- 12 Retro Fonts
Great Mac Integration:
- Drag and Drop Files
- Customizable Keyboard
- Mouse Copy/Paste
- Command-Click to Open URLs
- Save/Recall Favorite Commands
Special Effects:
- Choose from a large collection of themes spanning every era.
- Tweak to your heart's content with a dozen real-time sliders.
- Effects include screen curvature, burn-in, scan-lines, and transparency.
- Glowing halos simulate the human eye's reaction to intense brightness.
- Slow down the bitrate like an old modem.
Dirty Details:
- The quirks of old electronics are charming to the modern eye.
- Watch the strange dance of horizontal desyncs and splitting colors.
- Turn up the static, jitter, and flicker to add an analog warmth.
- Pixels burn-in and slowly fade away when turned off.
- Slow-motion retrace lines show the picture being refreshed.
Hyperrealism:
- Cathode's many lifelike touches constantly surprise and delight.
- Ray tubes burst open in new windows and bounce as they're moved.
- Dynamic perspective, lighting, and shadows raise the bar for app visuals.
- Customizable sound effects highlight your interactions.
- Use an image or webcam photo as glass reflection.
Full-Screen Experience:
- Immerse yourself and disregard thirty years of user interface progress.
- Impress curious onlookers at work, school, or the cafe.
- Zoom in on virtual pixels for blocky resolutions.
- Works great with multiple monitor setups.
- Hide the clutter of modern computing.
But Wait, There's More!:
- Cathode isn't just a terminal, it's also a great text editor.
- Use familiar dialogs, menus, key combos, and gestures.
- Open any image file to generate ASCII art.
- View your webcam feed as real-time ASCII art.
- Save screenshots.
Requirements:
- iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro: 2007 or newer
- MacBook, MacBook Air, Mac mini: mid-2008 or newer
- Unsupported graphics cards: Intel GMA 950 and X3100, ATI Radeon X1600
What's New in Version 2.3.0
Cosmetics:
- New app icon.
- Updated retina artwork.
- Easier to see mouse cursor.
Bugfixes:
- Prompt text properly clears when resizing window.
- Fixed Yosemite glitches.
Screenshots
Customer Reviews
Must-have for retro loving developers!
This app is just perfect! If you're 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 70's and 80's, as well as many different types of effects to let your terminal sound as though it's 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 crazy awesome
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..
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.
- $4.99
- Category: Developer Tools
- Updated: Nov 07, 2014
- Version: 2.3.0
- Size: 4.2 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: Secret Geometry, Inc.
- © 2012, Secret Geometry, Inc.
Compatibility: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor