But beyond the cool Quake-style "hot key" overlay terminal that's always at the ready, once you start using other features of iTerm, you'll really appreciate all the amazing features it has!
For example:
- being able to press Cmd-Shift-E to quickly show/hide timestamp overlays for your entire scrollback
- pressing Opt-Cmd-B to open the time-slider of the Instant Replay feature to go back and grab output from the terminal that's not in your scrollback because it was clobbered by `less` messing up your screen
- pressing Cmd-/ to highlight the active cursor
- pressing Opt-Cmd-M to set an annotation at the cursor so you can quickly jump through your scrollback to them with Opt-Shift-Cmd-↑ and Opt-Shift-Cmd-↓
- want to know when a long-running command finishes? Just press Opt-Cmd-A in that window or pane to set an alert and you'll get a macOS notification when the prompt appears (be sure to enable Shell Integration: https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html)
the list goes on and on... like `vi`, iTerm rewards study of its capabilities.
No other terminal comes close...
I think that should be a window-manager feature anyway. Not sure about other platforms, but at least on desktop linux there are options to put any app into something like a quake dropdown.
On Linux I use yakuake for that (was in the repo), added it to the startup applications for my desktop environment.
On my Macbook Air I didn't find anything suitable.