Cathode turns the dashboard back into an instrument panel. State is a fixed-width marker, alignment is the layout, and the phosphor screen tells you what is happening before you read a word.
// WHAT IT IS
Soft SaaS shells hide state inside friendly pills. Cathode does the opposite: it exposes the instrument. Monospace columns line up, status is a literal token, and the screen glows where it matters.
Every status is a text marker — [OK], [SYNC], [WARN], [ERR] — rendered in the buffer, never as a soft badge or icon circle.
Widths are measured in ch. Labels, values, and meters land on the same grid a code editor and a terminal share.
A CRT scanline ground with three highlighter accents. Green is the signal, cyan is the trace, amber is attention.
> THE GRAMMAR
The same console you ship to operators. Prompt-style section labels, an event buffer, and state you can read down a single column.
$ WHY OPERATORS KEEP IT
When the page is an instrument, the eye goes straight to the row that changed. No card shadows to parse, no badge shapes to decode — just a column of fixed-width state.