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Cathode is a toolkit for writing terminal-based applications. It is effectively a complete replacement for the .NET console APIs.

With Windows Terminal having replaced the old Windows console host, it makes little sense for console interaction to still be centered around the old console host and the many limitations it had. Cathode provides an API centered around a VT100 terminal with some extensions from later models and modern terminal emulators. It works on all desktop platforms that .NET supports.

Please note that, since Cathode replaces a very fundamental component of the framework, the use of certain framework APIs (e.g. System.Console) becomes problematic. An analyzer will automatically diagnose usage of such APIs and suggest working replacements.

Terminals

Cathode aims to have excellent support for the following terminal emulators, multiplexers, and libraries:

• Alacritty

• Black Box

• ConEmu

• Contour

• foot

• Ghostty

• GNOME Terminal

• Guake

• hterm

• iTerm2

• kitty

• Konsole

• mintty

• mlterm

• PuTTY

• rxvt-unicode

• sakura

• Terminal.app

• Terminology

• Tilix

• tmux

• VTE

• Warp

• WezTerm

• Windows Terminal

• Xfce Terminal

• Xterm.js

• xterm

• Yakuake

Even if you are using a terminal emulator that is not listed here, chances are that it will work just fine; these are just the ones that are tested regularly during development.