How to create a “Quake-style” console in OS X
August 3rd, 2007 by Ross McKillop |
Print This Post
Using the fantastic application Visor (brought to you by the same geniuses who created Quicksilver) you can create an easy keyboard-shortcut to invoke a drop-down console, just like in Quake.
- First things first, download and install SIMBL, a very small (but required) application. Installing SIMBL is easy, just run the package and click next a bunch of times. Once it’s installed, download Visor itself.
Open the Visor .zip file and drag the Visor.bundle file to your Mac HD -> Library -> Application Support -> SIMBL -> Plugins folder.
- Now open a Terminal - which can be found in your Applications -> Utilities folder (or launched via Quicksilver or Namely, if you use either of those great programs).
- When the Terminal opens, you should see a Visor icon in your menu bar. Click it and select Visor Preferences….
- From here you’ll want to define your own HotKey (keyboard shortcut) to open Visor. Select the Edit button and then set a HotKey by actually clicking the keys on your keyboard that you want to use to open Visor. I opted for Apple Key + ` but you can use pretty much anything you’d like.
- Close out of the Visor preferences and invoke the HotKey you just set. Visor should now slide a Terminal down from the top of your screen, just like the Quake console.
- Invoke the same HotKey and Visor will slide away, revealing your full desktop again.
One of the fun (admittedly not entirely useful) features of Visor is that you can set it to have a Quartz animation as the background. To do so, go back to the Visor Preferences and place a check in the box labeled Use Quartz Animation: and then click Choose File to navigate to a suitable animation. Hint: most often you can find Quartz animations in your Library -> Screen Savers folder.
- The next time you bring up Visor, it will have the Quartz animation as its background
- If you have any questions or problems by all means please feel free to leave a comment below. Also, if you want to set your Terminal (and Visor) to have a transparent background, the details are outlined here. Cheers!
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
5 Responses to “How to create a “Quake-style” console in OS X”
By Xeleneo on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
my be you interesed in multiTab, well use gnu/screen, write screen in you visor terminal and boala…
http://www.xeleneo.com.ar/index.php/blog/show/Visor_terminal_tipo_quake_para_Mac_os_X.html
By The How-To Geek on Sep 30, 2007 | Reply
This is a really sweet article… gonna try this later today.
By Mac-Addict on Nov 10, 2007 | Reply
Nice desktop. Is it some place I can download it from
By Drew on Nov 30, 2007 | Reply
Hi, I’m having a problem getting my visor console to display transparent.
I’ve set my Terminal preferences to transparency as per the linked instructions; and when I launch Terminal.app it comes up with transparency, but when I activate the Visor console with my key combo it always comes up as the default white/opaque terminal.
How do I get Visor to use the same prefs as my Terminal?
Thanks.