QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch | Hacker News Reader

QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch

quakenotch.com

80 pointsrohanrhu88 comments

Expectation: "Quake terminal" implies playing Quake, possibly in some Asciinema-type way. Maybe just starting the built-in Quake terminal without the game-play.

Reality: a regular terminal that starts in the notch and expands to normal window.

I guess it's somehow based on the terminal that was in Quake but that was only really used for issuing quake commands, not really for being a posix-compliant, VT-100 compatible terminal.

[Update: it was quickly pointed out that "Quake terminal" is a term of art for one line terminal that can easily expand. I am a heavy terminal user but genuinely did not know that term was commonplace. Grumpiness retracted.]

"Quake terminal" has been a term of art for a regular terminal that drops down from the top of the screen like the terminal in Quake did for the last 20-22 years. I remember this being a thing when I started using Linux back then.

https://github.com/Guake/guake

https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/

Yakuake, Kuake (2003), etc.

Oh, interesting. Surprised that I didn't already know that. Perhaps every time I encountered the term "quake terminal" I just assumed it literally meant the the Quake terminal proper.

I'll let my original comment stand since it seems likely that at least some others will have the same impedance mismatch as I did.

In any case, thanks for pointing it out.

No worries, mate! When the popular narrative is "you can run Doom on a pregnancy test" your blind spot tracks.

By the bye, I know Foone hates their threads being posted here, so I won't, but I absolutely adore their hardware and software finagling. It's also made me a better developer!

I’ve been using Linux since 1999 (thanks for the Halloween memos, Microsoft!) and this is the first I’m hearing of Quake terminals. I would also have assumed it involved the actual game somehow.

I think the much more common name is the console? I never heard about a Quake “terminal” tbh. It has always been the console to input console command.

TIL and TIL Windows Terminal supports it, and by default it uses tilde key like the real one that's not available in my keyboard. pain.

Interesting. Pretty sure it was called the 'console' in Quake. Guess it's a microscopic step from 'console' to 'terminal'.

It never stopped being a thing!! :)

Yes, I remember yakuake. Today I use tilda[1], it is really nice.

[1] https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda

I think this kind of functionality has been called "Quake Terminal" for quite some time now...

It's a "Quake-style terminal", much like Guake or Yakuake, no need to be pedantic.

Totally agree, I even grew up in the quake/dn3d era and wasn't familiar with the term either!

Yeah, never heard the term "quake terminal" before, and I used to play Quake and use Yakuake. Even in Quake it was always the console, never the terminal, because it wasn't a terminal.

You’re not the only one!

I figured this was the natural evolution of “hacking random device to be able to play DOOM” to “hacking the notch on my computer to play Quake.”

I have never heard the fans on my 2021 16" MBP until I opened this website. GPU usage spiked to 65% when opening the site in Firefox, enough to trigger the fan on this otherwise silent machine.

My iPhone, which has one of the most recent chips, is burning hot right now.

Glad to see this comment. Same happened to my iPhone and the website was laggy - was super confused at first..

Scrolling through the site (iPhone 14 Pro) was like playing a modern game at 15 frames per second.

It's the useless canvas element.

All 12 cores on my machine pegged. Sites like this should be studied.

Its actually kind of amazing that a landing page can do that to a modern computer.

Makes me curious of what kind of beast hardware the developer has in order not to notice the lag. Kind of interesting that a simple landing page takes more resources than many modern games.

Just watched my iPhone 15 battery drop 2% scrolling for <60s

I was going to comment that the page video is a GIF and was going to be huge, around 10MB, but surprisingly is 4.28 MB. Still huge, I converted the GIF to MP4 with https://cloudconvert.com/gif-to-mp4 and is 575 KB and the quality is great. It should be more common just use <video> instead of a GIF for many cases.

I noticed that was a GIF because I have an extension to not autoplay GIFs [1], it is great to don't have to see moving stuff without consent. Actually, the extension can be better, I would prefer to have a play button to GIFs/see a "GIF" label on the image, now I have to change the setting of the extension and reload the page. I'm not a developer and try to do the extension with Claude but didn't work, if someone knows an extension with that feature let me know! I looked for it and can't find it, it may be a great opportunity to create one, devs!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gifpuase/

No you were right to be disappointed! I was similarly in a state of excited awe to see someone play actual quake inside the notch of a mac. Much like the noble hacker tradition of getting Doom to run on the most unexpected devices possible. So yes, ID Software games running in weird places is an entirely reasonable expectation!

'just a terminal' is maybe also a legit term of art and entirely useful for somebody out there. But much less cool that we were hoping for!

Felt this pain last week. The sad fact is that auto-play with looping is only reliable with `<img>` and its formats. WebP can do a bit better than GIF but not nearly as well as MP4.

Cool idea! Unfortunately the terminal doesn't really work when using fish shell. The prompt is always stuck at the top. Also the "artificial" notch is larger than the physical notch and even larger than the menu bar which is mildly unsatisfying and I didn't find an option to adjust the size.

No comment on the app, but the website was not scrolling smoothly on my iPhone 15 Pro.

it brought my 16-core desktop with 24gb GPU to a crawl, perhaps the only time a website has done that. impressive tbh

Same with Chrome on desktop.

There's an animated background element with shooting stars that seems to be updating per-pixel. The more pixels it draws, like for a high res screen, the slower the page seems to render. I deleted that element and it scrolled smoothly.

My iPhone 13 almost overheated…

“Huh let’s what everyone talking about!”

opens site, phone begins roasting

“I don’t know what I expected.”

It really is so instant and oddly enough I don’t know if I remember the last time a site roasted my phone in this way.

How does the dev of this site not catch this kinda thing, serious question

Yeah I started to literally feel the heat in my fingertips and had to eject!

Odd, I see no performance problems at all on Firefox on Linux, this must be a Blink/Webkit thing.

I doubt it, since I saw it on my firefox+linux machine. Perhaps hardware? I was using AMD CPU + graphics.

Intel i7-6820HQ CPU/Graphics on a 9yo Thinkpad P50 which does have an NVidia Quadro M2000M but I only use it when needed through Prime. Firefox Nightly 141.0a1. Showing the animation at the top of the page runs up the GPU to 20%, repeatedly scrolling up and down the page using the scrollbar can get it up to about 75%. Scrolling remains smooth but sometimes the content on the top of the page takes a second to appear.

As a long-time Yakuake fan, I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that iTerm2 can also be configured to have a quake-like terminal window.

It just does not look as smooth as QuakeNotch :-D

I want to love this, but it's basically an aesthetic experience, and I have two and a half complaints that prevent me from loving it:

1) It needs an option to be the exact height of the menu bar when collapsed. On my system, it's ~4 pts taller then the menu bar, which means it intrudes into the chrome of maximized windows. Ewww. The goal is to reclaim wasted space, not take more!

2) It pretty consistently drops frames when expanding on a system under light memory pressure. Seems like there's likely a few pages that need to be wired to keep it from needing to page in too much on activation? Tracing memory accesses on activation, clustering those functions (with order files) and variables (with linker scripts) to a minimal number of pages, and wiring those pages could make this better. Dropping frames is a bug!

2.5) I don't use my laptop for music. Let me turn off the red "note" that launches Music, because (a) it's useless and (b) it's really buggy for those of us who have never accepted Apple Music terms of service -- full UI lock-up when waiting for permission. Instead, let me put something useful there. A CPU meter would be amazing! Or even better, an indication of whether a terminal is still executing a command / done and ready for input -- not sure how to hook this in general, but would be great.

This is incredibly constructive feedback!

When working on projects that meld digital and physical realities, ergonomics and aesthetics become a hyperfocus and observations like this are vital for course correcting.

Thanks, ChatGPT.

Bruh, that's all me.

ChatGPT wouldn't have mismatched the singular/plural of "observations" and "this"

Dang, I hate being authenticated by a grammatical error.

$7 for something that can be done for free in iTerm

Or just a keyboard shortcut to bring up the terminal

A dropdown is a bit nicer than a simple foregrounding key shortcut is. It never has to be window managed, floats on top of everything else as long as it’s toggled open (even as you’re shuffling through other windows), and makes for a better drop target that benefits from Fitts’ Law.

The website says $14 for me now.

Ah, now there’s a popup to use the discount code “MEOW” for 50% off. Didn’t see/notice that before.

The iTerm version of the feature is buggy, in my experience. The old haxie[0] Visor/TotalTerminal[1] which patched it into the Apple terminal produced a better result, somehow despite being literal hack.

I wouldn’t be opposed to paying for a dropdown terminal that worked as well as or better than TotalTerminal did.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity [1]: https://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

I have a hammer and am looking for a nail, but every day something sparks Marshall McLuhan ringing in my head.

The medium truly is the massage. The physical form in which information is being delivered (screen with notch) is beginning to work us over on a concept as old as the terminal.

Yeah, Yakuake; TotalTerminal; and others kept the Quake terminal flame alive, but now that game UI choice interacts with physical reality!

Which reinforces my spicy take...

Spicy take: Skeumorphism is a necessary and probably effective guard rail against tech usage unmooring us from physical reality.

Plus, this augmented reality take on the concept is taking that idea to at least eight strange new places.

Thankfully you don't see an artistic representation of a 3.5 floppy representing an app's "save" function yes-and-ing people into messiah complexes and public mental breakdowns.

All that being said, I am giving this a spin when my work laptop arrives! (Worst case I use the, mostly(?), iTerm2 functional equivalent because that worked pretty well for my needs when I set it up many moons ago.)

It set my 32 core Threadripper on fire. I’ve never seen a site so laggy and bad that wasn’t because of a thousand ads.

Tangent, but when I load this page it plays a video, which is a nice way to demonstrate a primarily visual thing, but the video has no controls, and specifically no scrubber bar. How do you mess this kind of basic stuff up in 2025? Like, you have to go out of your way to screw that up, right?

I thought this was to run Quake on that little black section at the top of the MacBook screen.

This looks like fun, but it's very easy to set up iTerm 2 to do the same thing. Every computer I use (Mac or Linux) is setup to drop down a terminal whenever I hit F12 - full screen, split in half, with 80% opacity just because it looks cool.

I think you need a Mac to have a smooth background animation...

Just kidding, Chromium can handle it too; it just seems a bit heavy for Firefox. But sometimes you wonder why on earth you have to add such resource-hungry effects.

That website almost set my phone on fire

i restarted my phone thinking something was wrong with it

Unusable on iPhone safari. Switched to Mac and fans sped up to max.

Tried it out and it crashed so bad I had to force reset my M3 air.

It has functionality for showing active music. I was clicking around to try and disable this functionality. In doing so it launched Apple Music (software which I never use). MacOS asked for my permission to allow QuakeNotch to control music. I could not click on anything and had a permanent rainbow wheel. The force quit menu did not show QuakeNotch so I needed to hold the power button. That's an instant uninstall for me.

This article just reminds me that Apple is overdue to do something about the notch in the MacBook lineup.

I thought it was so huge because they planned on adding FaceID but that never materialized.

Now it’s just a gigantic notch and it still has the ability to block UI elements and completely break the functionality of the menu bar unless you plug in an external monitor.

I must be well out of the loop because I had no idea that the notch was anything other than a cosmetic trick to hide the camera.

Those of you that enjoy iTerm2, it can do this.

Thanks! Just learned about hot key windows.

https://www.karam.io/blog/2018/turning-i-term-in-to-a-quake-...

Ha! Pretty neat actually for the novelty. Sadly i don't have an iPhone. I've had a Quake terminal on my setup for now 20 years at first because it was oh so cool but now it's so ingrained in my flow i feel lost without one...

This won't work for iPhones. It requires osx.

Back in my Quake days we called it the (Quake) console.

That said, they seem to be tempting fate by using "Quake" in the name and a logo very similar to Q1. Especially risky since they appear intent on selling it.

Windows terminal used the name quake mode for the similar functionality it offers and there of course the Yakuake that does the same on Linux. Haven't heard of anyone rattling the copyright chain about it yet.

while that may be true, the QuakeNotch logo uses trademarked iconography, at least avoid that:

QuakeNotch Logo: https://quakenotch.com/_next/static/media/QuakeNotch.84f1df8...

Trademarks:

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75350547&caseSearchType=U...

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75350175&caseSearchType=U...

> 14.03.02 - Bolts; Fasteners, bolts; Fasteners, nails; Fasteners, screws; Nails (hardware); Nuts (hardware); Rivets; Screws; Tacks, thumb; Thumbtacks

> 26.01.03 - Circles, incomplete (more than semi-circles); Incomplete circles (more than semi-circles)

the ontology on this stuff is fascinating. That's a fastener?

I suspect there is a legal difference between offering a feature in the style of Quake (and calling it out as such) vs. baking it into your App’s branding.

Microsoft also owns id/ZeniMax, the owners of the copyright.

Super cool! I don't see any clear description of what the difference between the pro and the free licenses are. Maybe the website could be updated with that?

PSA: you can get a drop-down quake style terminal (a la guake/yakuake) on mac using ghostty for free. I use ghostty uniquely for that feature.

> The Mac notch app you've always waited for

That's just hilarious :D

It makes the notch bigger? No thanks.

it took me a while... i had to search. macs have notches now? and people think that's ok?

Yeah it sucks. I don't think its OK but I am saddled with it. You kind of forget about it sometimes and other times it's glaring.

It's OK because it lets the screen be bigger.

It's less of adding a notch, more of extending the screen upwards except where the camera is.

It didn't take away from any previous screen real estate.

(It does make something like Bartender even more necessary than before though. It's inexcusable Apple doesn't have a built-in solution for properly handling menu bar icons. But that's still a problem even without the notch.)

Consider the other options:

1. Have a bezel instead. This reduces the overall screen height and pixel count.

2. Have the camera stick above the screen instead. Lenovo did that on some Thinkpads recently. The problem is that it is still sticking out when closed.

2a. Fold the camera somehow. Requires the display to be thick enough to allow that, at least in that one area.

3. Don't have the camera at all.

Given that Macs normally always have the menu bar on top except when the app is completely fullscreen, the first approach makes the most sense - it allows the menu bar to be placed into the space reclaimed by removing the bezel.

To be honest when you catch a good look at the camera in the glare, it is about the size of the remaining bezel on the mbp. I'm not sure why the camera unit necessarily needs all this vertical buffer space. Maybe they wanted to use an off the shelf camera instead of making something narrower (and perhaps longer) that would fit seamlessly in the display. I expect that is probably coming in a couple years.

The camera is a lot bigger than just the visible lens part, plus there are other sensors too:

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/5JIdAqwLsxWAFAyZ

Apple isn't doing off-the-shelf. This already is as seamless as you get for the moment. They're not putting the notch in for fun.

I still don't get why the components have to be like this vs laid out more horizontally. I don't have a modern iphone in front of me to measure but the wrap around "oval" they have for the camera looks pretty svelte. I'm not sure what would be in the macbook webcam package that wouldn't be in the iphone considering the macbook package doesn't even have faceid capabilities.

or 4. buy the chinese flagship which have a wireless camera on the side, that you can take out and pop on top of the screen or use however.

Zero videos of this actually playing Quake.

Meh, just use iTerm2 hotkey window instead.

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