Quake-style slide-down terminal on Mac

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It’s official. I’ve bought a Mac. I have never used a Mac before, and I am actually enjoying the discovery process I have to go through to get up to speed on this new platform. (Example: While writing this first paragraph, I figured out – by trial and error – that you select words in chunks with Shift+Option, not Shift+Ctrl like on Windows.)

I’ve already had several small victories in the process of customizing OS X to my needs, and since Google Analytics reports that one third of you readers are on a Mac, I’d like to share a quick tip with you. One of my main reasons to switch to Mac is the availability of the terminal; which unleashes the power of the Darwin system behind the fancy GUI. I had half expected the visual aspects of this terminal to be highly configurable, and while some options exists, it wasn’t immediately possible to get the terminal to slide down in a cool Quake-style console way like I had dreamed of for a while.

So I set out to find a way to do this, and through this forum thread I found out that I was not the only Mac user with this strange need. Some of the clever geeks taking part in the thread has been so nice as to actually write a small application that enables the terminal to slide down; called Visor. I’m quite impressed with OS X being flexible enough to provide this kind of extensibility.

The installation is quite easy – just follow the instructions and make sure you have OS 10.4 – but one thing caught me, being a complete Mac newbie, as a small frustration: I didn’t know to look for the Visor icon (which is a small black terminal) next to the clock in the upper right corner. You must configure Visor using this menu (which will appear when you (re)start Terminal after following the instructions) before the terminal is able to slide down using your selected hot key.

As a final touch I’ve also opted to make the terminal semi-transparent and added some eye candy as a background image. You do this by opening a normal shell window in Terminal, make your settings in Window Settings > Colors and restarting Terminal. Visor also supports animated backgrounds, but I haven’t tried that out.

Visor

While I’m quite happy with Visor, I still have my doubts about whether Microsoft Entourage is the right email application for me (as a heavy Outlook user through many years it seemed an obvious choice) and whether Fire is the right instant messenger. One thing that really annoys me, and that I haven’t been able to solve so far, is that OS X automatically puts the computer to sleep when I close the lid. I am aware that various heating issues can occur if it didn’t, but I’m just used to close the lid while the computer is shutting down – this will put it to sleep during the shutdown. If anyone knows of a good solution for this, I’d be happy to hear from you.

6 thoughts on “Quake-style slide-down terminal on Mac”

  1. Welcome to the cult :)

    I too never shut down the laptop, I just close it and let it sleep. Works just fine.

    For IM, I use Proteus. Adium didn’t fit my needs, for some reason I don’t recall now.

  2. 1) Never shut it down! Sleep is your friend, shutdown is for suckers. It almost doesn’t use any power while sleeping so you should default to doing that — plus it makes the whole machine much more accessible any time you need a quickfix.

    2) Use AdiumX — Much nicer!

  3. Thanks for your comments, guys. I’ll definitely give AdiumX a try. I’m also very impressed by the sleep function – I had it sleeping the entire night on batteries, and the drain was almost non-existant.

  4. Hi Lau – and thanks for yesterday, that was fun.

    No, I actually didn’t give Mail much of change, because I wanted to stay compatible with all my fellow Outlook users – but now that I see how painfully slow Microsoft Office 2004 runs in Rosetta, I’m having second thoughts, also because I can’t sync with Entourage.

    I’ve installed Quicksilver; it seems pretty cool!

  5. Always happy to welcome fellow propellerheads to the binary wonderland of Macintosh. With the FreeBSD underpinnings wrapped in elegant, simple yet powerful design, the process truly becomes as beautiful as any destination. And unless you want it to, the discovery process which accompanies Macs never really ends. There are easter eggs tucked away all over the place. Mac Hacks can be a lot of fun, be they for useful endeavors such as Visor to your personal workflow, or great breaktime diddle-sessions uncovering hidden eye candy or even better, harnessing the stellar Apple Core API’s. Very happy to have you along for the ride.

    p.s. Apple WILL do stupid things from time to time. Just shake your head and understand shit happens to the best of us. But overall, the experience will be top-tier. Enjoy!

  6. Hi “Welcome” ;)

    Thanks for the encouragement. You are right, you can keep on discovering new “easter eggs” in OSX – just today, Lau (see comment #7) showed me a cool zoom function, where I can zoom in on anything by holding down Ctrl and scrolling – nice! :)

    On the downside I’m starting to realize that it was a bad choice to buy the cheapest Macbook Pro with only 512 MB RAM, since the laptop is swapping a lot under both OSX and Windows. Adding 1 GB of RAM will cost me 2500 DKK (more than 400$), so that’s not gonna happen immediately …