> The thing that annoys me most is that there's no global shortcut for new terminal windows.

Did you look at skhd?

https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

I found it through the yabai window manager - but I'm starting to think I might be better off with something less ambitious - as macos apis are restricted and yabai needs a lot of privileges to work with screen/desktops :'(

But skhd is very simple and powerful - it can run commands and also insert text (I rebind some keys for brackets and tilde which are annoying on Mac intl layouts).

Eg:

    # open terminal, blazingly fast compared to iTerm/Hyper
    cmd - return : /Applications/kitty.app/Contents/MacOS/kitty --single-instance -d ~

    alt - k : skhd --text "~"