One of the most appreciated features of terminals like Yakuake or Guake is their ability to appear and disappear instantly with a single keystroke, offering quick access without interrupting the workflow. Kitty, the GPU-accelerated terminal, can also replicate and improve this experience, combining its power with the convenience of a dropdown terminal.

The Dropdown Terminal Concept¶

The idea is simple: a terminal that resides in the background and shows or hides on demand. This is especially useful for quick commands, monitoring, or any task that requires brief interaction with the command line.

Kitty for Quick Access¶

Kitty does not have a native "dropdown" function like Yakuake, but its flexibility and scripting capabilities allow it to be configured for this purpose. The key lies in:

1. Dedicated Kitty instances: You can launch a Kitty instance in a "daemon" or background mode, ready to be activated.
2. Remote control: Kitty offers a remote control protocol (kitty @) that allows interacting with already open instances.
3. Window Manager: Using the rules of your window manager (KDE, Gnome, i3, Sway, etc.) to assign a hotkey that shows or hides the Kitty window.

Example Configuration¶

Here is a conceptual approach to achieve a quick access terminal with Kitty and a window manager (e.g., with xdotool for Xorg environments, or similar functions in Wayland):

1. Launch Kitty in the background: You can have a Kitty instance that starts automatically with your session and is configured to be "floating" and with a specific size.

2. Toggle Script: Create a small script that checks if the "always visible" Kitty window is active and, if it is, hides it; if not, shows it.

   ```bash

   !/bin/bash¶

   KITTY_CLASS="kitty-dropdown" # A custom class for the Kitty window KITTY_ID=$(xdotool search --class "$KITTY_CLASS" | head -n 1)

   if [ -z "$KITTY_ID" ]; then # If it doesn't exist, launch it kitty --class "$KITTY_CLASS" & else # If it exists, toggle visibility if xdotool getwindowfocus getwindowpid | grep -q "$(xdotool getwindowpid "$KITTY_ID")"; then xdotool windowminimize "$KITTY_ID" else xdotool windowmap "$KITTY_ID" # Show the window xdotool windowraise "$KITTY_ID" # Make sure it's on top xdotool windowfocus "$KITTY_ID" # Give it focus fi fi ```

3. Keyboard shortcut in your window manager: Assign a global key (e.g., F12) to run this script.

   ```

   Example in ~/.config/i3/config or similar¶

   bindsym $mod+F12 exec --no-startup-id /path/to/your/toggle-kitty-dropdown.sh ```

   And in your kitty.conf, you can configure the Kitty instance to have the specific class and a suitable position/size:

   ```

   kitty.conf (configuration for the dropdown instance)¶

   window_class_members kitty-dropdown initial_window_width 80% initial_window_height 40% window_border_width 0

   ... other appearance settings ...¶

   ```

This method gives you the speed and convenience of a dropdown terminal, but with all the power and customization that Kitty offers. It's the best of both worlds!