I can’t exactly remember but it was probably around 2007, and I was still an Ubuntu user. As a curious install-junkie, wasting my precious ADSL bandwith on random packages from apt repositories, I stumbled upon¹ Tilda and damn! It was AMAZING! I assigned the useless unused F1 as a shortcut to Tilda, and behold the magic! F1… A shell appears, F1… it disappears, F1… A shell appears, F1…

So the idea is simple: a terminal drops down from top of the screen with a single key stroke.

I think it comes from the Quake game series, but could be older. Tilda is not the only one implementing this behavior; The first one might be Guake, then there’s the modernized version Guake, iTerm2 also does it (although not out of the box, and thanks to MacOS²³ it looks ugly in the end), etc. Tilda happened to be the first one I found. It worked much better than others at the time (and still?), so I stick with it. It does have a pull-down animation which makes it look really like hackerman movies, but for me it’s distracting and was set to off.

Back to 2024, the year that everything has to be re-written in Rust™, as a dutiful internet citizen I took the responsibility and did the re-write⁴. Twice. An Alacritty + iced is a work in progress too.

• For Gtk3 [GitHub][Crate]: cargo install zoha.
• For Gtk4 [GitHub][Crate]: cargo install zoha4.

Disclaimer: It’s never tried on Windows. MacOS was WIP but never worked out due to a limitation in Gtk.

So my friends, do what must be done! kick those terminal emulators of yours, whatever they are, out. Use a pull-down terminal. It’s a 10000% productivity boost. I don’t care if you install Zoha, Tilda, Guake; just use it. Join us! (and you’ll be addicted soon).