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by BlueBerry2001·2mo ago·view on hn ↗
Been sharing progress on Cate here for a while. v1 is finally in a pretty solid state now: https://github.com/0-AI-UG/cate, https://cate.cero-ai.com

Cate is an open source desktop workspace built around an infinite canvas. Instead of constantly switching between terminals, editors, browser previews, docs, and AI tools, you arrange everything spatially in one place.

Big improvements since the earlier posts:

docking, tabs, and splits detachable native OS windows git worktree support unified Cmd+K search much smoother rendering/performance on larger canvases AI provider + MCP integration Stack: Electron, React, Monaco, xterm.js/node-pty, Zustand.

Runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. MIT licensed.

Would love feedback from people with heavy multi-window or terminal-based workflows.

3 comments
> Been sharing progress on Cate here for a while

8 days is a while?

I checked because I’ve had a similar idea for several years and wanted to see the earlier discussion on your shared Cate progress.

There’s nothing. You linked it 8 days ago on a brand new account and it died.

Fair point. The wording was a bit clickbaity, I get that.

It’s definitely not dead though. Quite the opposite: the project is actively growing and improving. The first post didn’t get much traction, but we kept working on it, fixed a lot of rough edges, and v1 is in a much better state now.

I should have phrased that more clearly.

I'd love to get this as a self-hosted web service, so that I could access my infinite terminal canvas from any browser. It should of course held the sessions in the background even when I'm not connected.
That would be a really interesting direction, and I agree it fits the idea well.

Right now Cate is a local desktop app because we wanted the first version to work closely with local projects, shells, files, node-pty/xterm, browser panels, Monaco, git worktrees, etc.

A self-hosted web version would need a different architecture: a backend that owns the PTY sessions, keeps them alive when the browser disconnects, handles auth/security, and syncs the canvas state to the client. Definitely possible, but a bigger shift than just “put the current app in the browser”.

Long term I think remote/headless workspaces and reconnectable sessions would make a lot of sense.

Is https://cate.cero-ai.com supposed to be an functional demo? Because most basic widget handling either doesn't work or is broken.
It shows a lot of promise but yeah, the actual app is just as broken. Love the concept and I'll be keeping half an eye on where it goes but right now its simply too janky for me to use it on a daily basis. If the author is reading here's a few things that came up for me within about 2 minutes of using it:

- I can't scale windows by grabbing the top edges like I can on the bottom/side edges.

- The command palette provides me with a list of open windows but selecting them doesn't do anything.

- A pinch to zoom gesture zooms in and out over unfocused panes but scrolls on focused ones. A keyboard modifier key I can hold that puts me into workspace pan/zoom mode regardless of where my cursor is would be great.

- It seems really erratic as to whether grabbing a pane and dragging will move it, scale it, or do nothing at all.

- The displayed cursor quite frequently has no correlation with what it's going to do.

- The mini map should really allow me to drag around my viewport on it rather than clicking and jumping to a specific place.

I really want to love this, its a great concept for working with complex projects but as I say right now its simply not there. Here's a few bonus things I'd love to see:

- The ability to rename terminal windows. Terminal 1,2,3,N is going to be unusable almost immediately.

- A jump to pane function (probably triggered via the command palette pane list) which allows me to select a specific terminal/editor/region/whatever and be jumped straight to it.

- Please add Kagi as a search engine option.

- As someone else has mentioned the real killer feature here would be the ability to run Cate with a remote backend, either accessed via a web browser or the Electron wrapper. I routinely use both VSCode devcontainers locally and remote machines over SSH and I'd love to be able to have a bunch of open sessions I can just jump back into.