Visor for OSX provides a systemwide terminal window accessible via a hot-key, much like the consoles found in games such as Quake.
Tested on OSX 10.5.6 Leopard (Intel)
You can now trigger Visor with your hotkey from any application to get an instant terminal session.
To hide Visor, you can either:
git clone git://github.com/darwin/visor.git
cd visor
rake
rake install
Feel free to fork and contribute.
Visor is just a light-weight wrapper of Terminal.app (SIMBL). You should be able to use all Terminal.app features with Visor.
There can be only one visor-ed terminal window in the system. If you close this terminal window (for example Control+D or typing exit in shell), Visor gets into disabled state you are describing. Just open a new terminal window and it gets visor-ed again. You can do it for example by clicking on Terminal.app icon in Dock.
If there is a visor-ed terminal window (Visor menu-bar icon is active) every new terminal window gets opened as a classic OSX window. In other words, open at least two terminal windows. Second one will be classic for sure.
Go to Terminal.app preferences -> Window -> Rows
Look for "Position" option in Visor Preferences and pick "Left-Stretch" window placement.
By default Visor window does stretch to full screen width. Set some non-stretching positioning for Visor window in Visor Preferences, then Go to Terminal.app preferences -> Window -> Columns.
Go to Visor Preferences -> Screen
Visor 1.6 does not respect spaces settings (Issue 52). Visor 1.7+ forces it's window to be visible on every space. You may disable it in Visor Preferences. Note: spaces configuration about Terminal.app doesn't apply to visor-ed terminal window, it is effective only for other (classic) terminal windows.
Well, Terminal.app has preference sets called profiles and you can run new terminal windows with different profiles. Original version of Visor took "VisorTerminal" profile in case it was available. This was removed in latest version. Simply use Terminal.app ways how to start terminal window with preferred profile like you normally would. Visor doesn't touch your profile neither has special logic how to pick one.
v1.8.1 (05.03.2009)
v1.8 (04.03.2009)
v1.7 (12.02.2009)
v1.6 (03.02.2009)
v1.5a1 (Nov 2007?)
v1.2.1
v1.2
v1.1 (drparallax's unsupported version?)
v1.0
Please see the original website for more information, the issue tracker and so on.