The author talked to the Cathode developer and even opened a feature request for iTerm2[1]. There seems to be some interest in this. Cathode is mostly about emulating old, slow hardware, this would be about the opposite (code wouldn't look too differently, though). A "movie hacker" terminal or editor for live coding would be pretty interesting. Hmm, maybe in addition to Xt/Gtk/OSX one could add an OpenGL interface to Emacs for maximum scriptability.
I think I've seen an Emacs video using the same "fake old retro" scanline look but I'm not sure how it was made. Could have been postprocessed on the whole video too.
For the glow: duplicate the video layer, add a fast blur effect and set it to overlay or color dodge blending mode.
For the scanlines: AFX has a scanlines/cathode effect that you can tweak to re-create that look. I can't recall off the top of my head how it's done, but I can look it up if you'd like (I've done it before, while fucking around in AFX [1]).
Sam Aaron, the guy who has done a bunch of screencasts with Overtone (and his emacs/dvtm config), and used it to create this emacs config setup, has used the same effect on pretty much everything. It really does add an element of coolness to the mix.
I've been using emacs live for a bit. It's great. It bundles some nice plugins and has sane defaults. The cyberpunk colour scheme is cool. It has some nice personal touches on the scratch buffer.
The downside is that the structure puts far more emphasis on maintaining the structure than adapting your config. If you want to keep it solid you can't use package manager without some changes, or (configure-group).
You might get the odd issue with the bundled plugins (auto-complete loved lisp and file system traversal but hated other languages), but for a "I want to live code and I want it to WORK" config, it's bloody good.
oh i like, how does this compare to pd and max/msp, apart from the fact that those are visual.
it seems that the overtone guys want to add a visual display in the future. but most comparisions of supercollider and max/msp are mainly focused on the frontend.
is there anything i can do with max that i can't with sc besides looking pretty? (although i do prefer a nice editor to a visual thingie)