Visor

Visor for OSX provides a systemwide terminal window accessible via a hot-key, much like the consoles found in games such as Quake.

Latest release

[Visor 1.6](TODO link)

Tested on OSX 10.5.6 Leopard.

Installation

• Install SIMBL
• Place Visor.bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
• (Re)launch Terminal.app - You should now see the Visor menu item
• Configure your keyboard trigger by selecting the Visor menu item -> preferences and editing your keyboard hot-key

You can now trigger Visor with your hotkey from any application to get an instant terminal session.

To hide Visor, you can either:

• re-trigger with your key-combo
• optionally you can click off of the Visor window
• or you can also enable "Visor hiding on Esc" in preferences
• use the logout key-combo (control+d) to close the Visor window
• type "exit" in running shell to close it

Installation from sources

Prerequisities:

• ruby + rubygems
• XCode 3.0
• zip/unzip

Installation

git clone git://github.com/darwin/visor.git
cd visor
rake release version=1.6
rake install

Publishing

cd visor
git tag -a v1.6 -m "Release 1.6"
git push --tags
rake release version=1.6
rake publish

History

• v1.6 (03.02.2009)
  • first GitHub release == packaged pending changes from GitHub forks

original Visor 1.5 brought to you by BlackTree, kudos man!

Please see the original website for more information, the issue tracker and so on.

additional fixes by Torsten

• Fixed the "White Line Bug" (Issue 16)
• Added the option to hide Visor on Escape press. Press Shift+Escape, if you need a "Escape" in the Terminal.
• If you start Visor you get now initial focus. (Issue 20)

additional fixes by Darwin

• Build infrastructure
• It is possible to specify on which screen visor will appear - see preferences (Issue 15)
• Visor exits gratefully without locking UI (Issue 50)
• Visor becomes inactive when you close visor-ed terminal window or exit it's shell (fixes Issue 10)
• When inactive, Visor eats next coming terminal window (right click terminal.app icon and select "new window")
• Re-implemented window sliding animation using standard NSWindow functions, should fix weird bugs with mouse cursor state
• Removed support for Quartz powered backgrounds (want simpler codebase!)
• Gentle terminal window hijacking (solves Issue 5, Issue 6 and related problems. What more? It properly enables applescript automation in visor-ed terminal, which was my original motivation to get dirty with Visor internals)
• Whenever you open Visor window, it steals focus and you may start typing without touching mouse. Visor is a good guy and returns the focus back to original app when being hidden. I said ... don't touch that mouse!