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Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

Ghostty has a hard-to-find "quake mode" that may interest some.

During the beta I had it configured like this on macOS:

    keybind = global:cmd+space=toggle_quick_terminal
    quick-terminal-animation-duration = 0.1

There isn't an option to set the default height of the "quick terminal" window that I'm aware of but you can drag the bottom of the window after it opens and it will persist between toggles.

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Unfortunately no tab support yet in the quick terminal, and it does not work on top of fullscreen applications. Would be great if these things would work at some point.

Currently I am using Wezterm and iTerm2 for the quake style terminal, but using two different terminals is quite annoying. I really miss Visor and TotalTerminal.

About tab support, you mean pressing the tab key to, for example, autocomplete a command?

That seems to work for me (macOS 15.2 here)

GP means creating a new tab with CMD+T, which works in the normal ghostty terminal. iTerm2 does support tabs in its hotkey windows (~= ghostty's quick terminal).

Aaaaaah! Ok, what a confusion :D

Hmm any way for this to work in kde plasma wayland?

In yakuake they have to register the Open/Retract shortcut with KGlobalAccel [1] and I don't think global shortcuts are implemented otherwise

[1] https://github.com/KDE/yakuake/blob/164d24b8bad1175199260c62...

It's a macOS-only feature, for now.

Let's hope it will become available for Linux, too. I have been using Yakuake for over a decade now, mostly because I love how I can access the terminal everywhere with one button press.

At the same time, Yakuake seems to be in maintenance mode, and you should be happy when it works with new KDE versions.

I'm using ctrl+` :

    keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal

It was the first thing I made sure ghostty supported it before trying it.

Setting the initial height of the quick terminal is under development: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2384

Lack of tab support in the quick terminal is a bummer, but it should come eventually: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2329#issuecomm...

For now, splits are the way to go in the quick terminal.

Note, if someone is trying this, that you need to grant accessibility permissions for it to work when Ghostty isn't focused.

Thanks for the heads up - not sure I’ll be able to use it on my work laptop womp womp

This is the first thing I went looking for when looking at the docs, thank you.

what does quake mode do?

Scroll down from top on any screen

Comes from video games where you usually can hit ~ (tilde) or other character to make a in-game console appear, usually sliding down from above or at least in the top half/third/quarter of the screen. Popularized by Quake and games from that heritage (like Source engine) I suppose.

Desktop equivalent is that you have a terminal available at a short-cut/button-press that will always show it but not fully hide the rest, no matter what other context you're in. Pretty handy.

TIL. thank you for taking the time to answer - wasnt obvious from above whether or not this was some kind of joke easter egg thing

Same. I have been using this in Yakuake since 5 years but I never knew it was called a "quake mode"

This is especially amusing to me given your choice of terminal.

> a terminal available at a short-cut/button-press that will always show it but not fully hide the rest, no matter what other context you're in

I cant be the only person who uses Quake-style terminals at fullscreen. The second part of your sentence is the crucial bit: the ability to instantly conjure a persistent terminal regardless of whatever else I have on screen.

Can you then detach it to make it "non-quick", if you want to keep working on that separate context thing?

What I find annoying with my workflow (linux) is that starting a terminal and shell takes a lot of time. I wonder if it's possible to have a terminal always loaded so that my keybinding for creating a terminal would actually: move terminal in current workspace, focus it, then spawn another invisible terminal in the background.

Yakuake supports invoking the terminal in windowed-mode, if that's the profile you choose for it. I don't follow the purpose served by spawning an invisible background terminal; that doesn't seem to be common workflow, but I suspect you could wrangle it in your shell startup file so that the terminal self-invokes in hidden mode - but having 2 running copies (invisible and windowed) may result in both appearing when you press your global shortcut.

I kind of use tmux for this, to have a persistent session. Even if my desktop manager (Gnome3) crashes, which happens sometimes when I run a bazillion VMs and run out of memory, my tmux session still survives and I can `tmux attach` once logged in again.

So the idea would be that you start tmux somehow/somewhere, then in your new shell you can do `tmux attach` to get into that session from anywhere, and if you close this new shell, you can still do `tmux attach` to get back to where you were.

> I wonder if it's possible to have a terminal always loaded so that my keybinding for creating a terminal would actually: move terminal in current workspace, focus it, then spawn another invisible terminal in the background.

Use rxvt-unicode or another terminal that has a client/server mode. Start up a server in the background on boot or login (e.g. as a systemd user service), and make your keybind launch a new client process. Should be pretty much instant.

Yeah I have been using quake-style terminals (guake on linux, iterm2 on mac) for _years_. I never met another dev in person who also uses it.

I am a single massive monitor kind of person. Quake-style terminal + all apps in maximized window + multiple desktops (with a shortcut to switch between them) is so good. Pull up the same terminal no matter which desktop you are on.

Downside is that the quick terminal doesn't support tabs. Unfortunately that's currently a dealbreaker for me.

You can always run tmux inside. I personally don't use tabs in my terminal emulator at all, because I use tmux tabs for everything.

It may not work for you, of course.

Thank you! First thing I was looking for too. Cannot imagine trying a terminal without this.

Doesn't seem to like that keybind now, and searching the docs doesn't give me answer. Do you know if something still works?

Also, why cmd+space? That's the MacOS spotlight search binding.

I disable cmd+space for Spotlight in macOS System Preferences.

You could try another keybind:

https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#keybind

Also be sure to quit and reopen Ghostty or use the reload configuration option from the Ghostty menu.

Love me some quake style terminals, will check this out

Amazing, thanks! This is most of how I use a terminal. Will give it a go.

Does this work under Wayland? I remember that being an issue for Guake.

it should do. on Linux it uses GTK which supports Wayland these days

Where does one add this? Is there a config file?

https://ghostty.org/docs/config

On macOS, pressing ⌘+comma with Ghostty in focus opens the config file.

Quit and reopen Ghostty to load the updated config (or bind another key to the reload_config action: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#reload_con... ).

Keybinds are explained here: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#keybind

I just saw this https://ghostty.org/docs/config and was coming to update my post when I saw your comment.

Thank you!

Imma try out ghostty, WezTerm, and Rio thanks to this thread. And why not use them all. For terminal minded folks we are surely spoiled.

Brief update: I really really like rio. Out of the box it has the best theme, best setup. It’s fast. Pretty. I like it tons.

Ghostty is nice. Haven’t had much time with WezTerm.

It also has reload config in the Apple menu items which I found handy as the default keybinds didn't seem to work for me.

And you can reload the config with Cmd+Shft+, so Cmd+, to open the config (standard mac shortcut) and then the same with Shift to reload it, it's genius.

Super handy!

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