In January I switched from iTerm2 to TotalTerminal. After learning about it from Tony I felt totally in love with its persistent visor window that slides down and up when you press a hot-key.
I don’t think a tool has so quickly become indispensable in my workflow as TotalTerminal
— Tony in moderation (@tonylukasavage) 21 januari 2014
Switched back
Last month I finally switched back to iTerm2. I took me this long to find out iTerm had already copied this behaviour in 2010. However, it wasn’t until George Nachman’s did some final optimisations last week that I could really drop TotalTerminal.
Tweak it!
Here’s how I like iTerm2’s visor:
- Download and install the nightly build – the optimisations are not in the last beta/stable.
- Open the iTerm2 preferences.
- Under the Keys tab select only the first 2 checkboxes under Hotkey and change the Hotkey itself to
^`(default conflicts with Alfred’s). - Under the Appearance tab uncheck Hide tab bar when there is only one tab so you can easily drag in and out tabs from the visor.
- Under the Profiles tab tweak the Hotkey Window profile to your liking. I use minimal transparency for better readability and Full-Width Left of Screen style so it doesn’t cover SublimeText, which I normally have on the left-side.
Now wherever and whenever you need the console, just press ^` to open the visor or bring it to the front if it already was. By leaving the 3rd checkbox unselected I’ve set it not to hide when it looses focus so I can keep an eye on logs while I make changes in SublimeText that cause hot-reloads via TiShadow or LiveView.