It strikes me as a little odd for the terminal rather than the desktop environment within which it runs to implement the hotkey (or, as you call it, ‘Quake mode’).

I just have my tiling window manager configured with a keybinding to raise my terminal. No menu bar, no delay, no animation, just type the keybinding and bam, there’s my console, covering the complete screen. Another keybinding, and there’s my browser. Another keybinding, and there’s my editor.

How are you achieving this in MacOS?

I do this using Raycast, no matter which terminal emulator I'm using today (Terminal, Ghostty or Alacritty), I can just setup my global hotkey in Raycast and get the same "quake mode" everywhere.

Does the terminal appear instantly, and obscure everything else?

By default, the way MacOS does full-screen windows is by moving them to a space. Switching between the terminal and another application, e.g., Chrome, causes a large sliding animation between applications, which I absolutely do not want.

Oh I don't have it fullscreen, sorry, it usually covers the bottom half or bottom-left corner (depending on screen size). There it appears and disappears instantly.

I do something similar and I use Hammerspoon (with kitty in my case). It’s a hell of a tool!

> How are you achieving this in MacOS?

I don’t — I use Linux on my desktop. I stopped using macOS back when it was called System 8 or 9!

I think any tiling window manager can be configured to do this, but in my case I use StumpWM.

    (defcommand terminal () ()
      (run-or-raise "urxvt" '(:instance "urxvt")))
    
    (define-key *top-map* (kbd "s-t") "terminal")

With the above, when one types Super t then the terminal either is raised to the top, or starts (and runs on top).

From others’ comments, I think that this is probably possible with a modern Mac, too, but I find that Linux is generally easier.

StumpWM: https://stumpwm.github.io/

That sounds great, but I'm not changing my entire operating system just so I can have a possibly marginally better terminal emulation experience.

You would also get a better window manager, better compatibility with server operating systems, a bash updated this decade, XCompose (think the Option key, but way, way, way more powerful) and more freedom, but on the other hand you’d lose macOS-only programs, and from time to time would have to deal with something truly frustrating which would never be an issue on a Mac.

It’s certainly not perfect, but I do prefer it. But then, I enjoy yak shaving grin

> I enjoy yak shaving

As my username would suggest, so do I. However…

> a better window manager

The bulk of my workflow involves Chrome and tmux inside my always available full screen terminal. I haven't the need for multiplexing anywhere except the terminal.

> better compatibility with server operating systems

I run nix-darwin on MacOS, and I have remote NixOS machines configured as build hosts. This is important, as everything I write is Haskell, and it must be compiled for x86_64-linux.

> a bash updated this decade

I use zsh and the bash available in the latest nixpkgs.

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MacOS does an excellent job of managing all the other quality of life stuff that doesn't immediately concern me as a power user. A number of my current and former colleagues are all in on NixOS, but the number of times over the years I've had to wait at the beginning of a video chat for them to configure their audio settings, which sometimes means installing different drivers and/or turning their machine off and on again…

Yeah. Even as a huge nerd, I think MacOS is great.

Another option is rcmd. https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/