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.
Mainly the detach/attach facility. I can open it from ssh, without even closing the session in the terminal. They also provide split window facilities, tmux even more so.
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.
How many actual toys (that cost like $1 to produce) cost lots more than $10, and you wouldn't think twice about buying them? How much is a Barbie Doll nowadays?
Depends on how you want to spend the 10 entertaiment dollars. Some people watch movies, some play World of Warcraft, some buy applications that emulate grandpa's computer. ;)
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.
I recently downloaded iTerm2 because I had been hearing this. I can't for the life of me see why anyone thinks it is better than Terminal.
It might just be my usage pattern, which is basically tmux. I was even briefly excited about the so called tmux integration of iTerm2, but it actually made a great tool worthless.
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.
aiscott: terminal.app got a decent boost in Lion.. prior to that it was pretty lacking for people used to your basic linux terminal even. iterm2 fixed that up around the sametime andgot traction, thats all. you are nt missing anything, go with what wjorks for yourself.
I think the whole differences are in some edge cases (though for some those cases could be their bread and butter), like escape codes handling, advanced ncurses stuff, etc etc.
I've been using it for about six years as well, and every version is a little better. The only annoyance is having to add keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, but to make up for that, it supports UTF-8 (Japanese/Chinese input) perfectly.
Never got that working in iTerm, although newer versions might be better.
The only thing that still annoys me is that you can't rename the tabs (without doing some silly work-around). I have 10 tabs in Terminal.app with "bash" written in them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadhttp://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
iTerm2 'till I die!
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.
You care to explain how awesome it is?
Copy and paste is easy, no rat.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/6854396657/light...
Whatever floats your boat, I guess...
Bitching about $10 reminds me of this Oatmeal strip: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps
I used those kinds of terminals, mid nineties in Uni...
http://www.iterm2.com/
It might just be my usage pattern, which is basically tmux. I was even briefly excited about the so called tmux integration of iTerm2, but it actually made a great tool worthless.
Never got that working in iTerm, although newer versions might be better.
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.
I want one.
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.
It's a pretty fun app, especially when running fullscreen on Lion. Very customizable. You get your money's worth.
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.
Then just open a terminal full-screen, apply the plug-in and enjoy your vintage computer.
For best effect, change your font to a VT-100-like one (I prefer the 3278-like one, but that's a taste thing).
BTW, how hard is it to write a Compiz plug-in?