Visor

Visor provides a systemwide terminal window accessible via a hotkey, much like the consoles found in games such as Quake.

This page is being moved to: http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-visor/

• If your Visor session does not inherit your Terminal.apps appearance setting, make sure the terminal is the frontmost application, enable Visor, and then edit your appearance by choosing Terminal → Window Appearances. Edit, and make sure to click on “Use Settings as Default”
• Unable to change font in Window Settings.
• Text/files cannot be dragged and dropped onto the visor terminal like regular terminal windows unless the drag operation is started before invoking visor.

Please list bugs or misbehaviors below; keep these separate from enhancements or feature requests.

• Once terminal is launched and visor is activated, the error “The application Terminal quit unexpectedly. The problem may have been caused by the Visor plug-in”
• Visor window seems to 'grow' with each activation! Took up 1/2 of screen immediately after installation, now takes up approx 3/4 of screen. (OS X 10.4.7)
  • Here is a 'fix' for it: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070214223039729
  • Although I'm not the original reporter of this bug, I concur, and this bug is perhaps the sole downside for me of Visor – it now has grown past the bottom of the screen for me. A considerable usability flaw for me. You'd still have to wrench Visor away from my cold, dead hands, but I'll be ecstatic on the day when this bug is squashed.
  • This can be fixed. Open a Terminal, and execute (on one line): defaults write com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal -dict-add 'Rows' '15'
  • Using the above command spaced out all of my letters, a better way to do this is to make Terminal your frontmost app, bring up Visor, then go to window settings, select window from the dropdown menu and you can change the amount of rows there. Oh, and if anyone knows how to get my fonts back to normal please post
  • To fix these and other font setting problems first make the desired settings to a normal Terminal window and remember to click “Use Settings as Defaults”. Then (if you previously made settings to the Visor window), remove all of those settings by executing:

defaults delete com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal

Next relaunch Terminal and open the Visor window again. Now it should have the defaults of the normal Terminal window you just configured. Choose Window Settings and make a small adjustment to the Visor window so the VisorTerminal defaults are written again. After this you can make changes to a normal Terminal window and choose “Use Settings as Defaults” to revert your other Terminal windows to the settings you had previous. I agree it is a bit of hassle, but it fixes things for me

• Locking terminal's plist file prevents Visio from expanding the window
• I disabled logout using Ctrl-D, which I happen to hit way too often and which causes visor to grow one line each time. Edit Terminal Preferences (while Terminal.app is not running); under VisorTerminal, set ExecuteString to “set -o ignoreeof; clear” (without ””). Logout via Ctrl-D is now disabled only in visor and a nice message is printed when you accidently try to Ctrl-D. ~Crazor
• It also expands when the user runs 'exit' and causes the session to end, which I'm very used to. This bug needs to be addressed, as the work-around is cumbersome. ~Glutnix
• When opening Visor whilst another app has focus, that app's menu bar stays in place. Eg, if running Mail, press Visor shortcut - Visor appears, but menu bar still displays Mail menus, not Terminal menus. Would be better if Terminal's menu bar was displayed instead (even when visor was activated while working in a different app to Terminal). This is in the bug section because it prevents easy selection of Terminal menu items when in Visor.
• Doesn't see when the menubar is hidden, so when using utilities like menufela ( www.ninjakitten.us ) there's a gap between the window and the top of the screen. (Tip: if([NSMenu menuBarVisible]), fixing this takes *one* line of code, please fix it.)
• After connected to external display from MBP, Visor's vertical scale is extended to fit the external display. But the effect stays when the external display is removed and restarted. Now Visor takes up more than 3/4 of MBP display. It seems if I repeat the process, it would eventually take up the whole MPB display
• Certain Quartz Animations have problems rendering and leave behind trails
• When Visor is enabled, “do script in window frontmost” applescripts stop working
• Two empty lines are printed at the top of a new Terminal in Visor 1.2.1. This did not happen in Visor 1.0 or 1.1. This is due to the “Lines” setting being increased by two each time the vizor terminal is created (either by launching terminal.app or by opening visor again after dismissing it by logging out of the terminal session) (This bug originated in the beta release, with the “respects height setting” feature).
• About window shouldn't be resizable, and shouldn't have a title
• Exposé breaks sliding (fading continues to work)
• Visor freaks out for a second if you have a 2nd screen attached (Extended Desktop, 2nd screen ontop, not side-by-side). It shows up on the bottom of 2nd screen and then jumps to the main screen.
• Visor also places its drop down window on the wrong screen if you have two displays attached and there is an open terminal window on the non-menu bar screen.
• Visor drops down from whichever screen is home to the foremost open Terminal window. (If that is a secondary screen, this reveals the 'hidden menu bar' issue.) Visor should probably default to the primary screen, or to the screen with cursor focus.
• Visor 1.2.1 doesn't work with Virtue Desktop & Terminal bound to a different desktop (this was not a problem in v1.0)
• ^c and ^z characters (kill and stop job) aren't being accepted inside a Visor terminal, but work fine in a normal Terminal.app window. Are you sure about this? It works on my computer, using any version of Visor.
• When using irssi, picture stops redrawing from time to time. Needs manual refresh
• When running screen inside Visor, the hardstatus line continually gets overwritten and then redrawn
• When the visor terminal display is transparent, I'm seeing a shadow around the text that is displayed from a previous session, which appears to be 'burnt in' to the visor terminal window (ie, it doesn't scroll with the text).
• It's not possible to browse your history with cursor up/down. Not a problem on my setup using version 1.2.
• Selecting the (already) active application from the dock or the application switcher does not dismiss visor Not an issue in fresh install of 1.2.
• Output of scripts running from ~/.zlogin on user login, always shows up in Visor. It needs to go into the actual terminal window for applications like Keychain, waiting for user input
• If Visor is invoked while an application other than Terminal is in the foreground, when it is dismissed the next open Terminal window pops to second in the window stack (behind the topmost active window). If you then switch to Terminal (with Cmd-TAB, the Dock, QS, &c.) that window receives keyboard focus, but neither it nor any other Terminal windows come visually to the front.
• Installing Visor under 10.5 Leopard (Golden Master), using SIMBL 0.8.2, appears to cause Terminal.app to crash upon launch.

• Visor works in Leopard by following instructions given in this Ars Technica Mac Ach thread.
• Even though I set Terminal.app to send the strings \001 (\C-a) and \005 (\C-e) on home/end keys, Visor keeps jumping to the beginning and end of the scrollback history. This is very annoying, because you can't jump to the beginning of the command you just typed to edit something.
• In Leo 10.5.6, Terminal crashes after giving command “exit”, then attempting to re-invoke Visor, or if I cmd-tab to Terminal.

Please list feature requests below:

• The ability to associate different visor hotkeys to different saved .term files – I have .term files that save different featuresets for each host … I name the .term file with the hostname (e.g. FOO.term) so I can call it up in Quicksilver without issue … it'd be nice to have CTRL+F2 open FOO.term, CTRL+F3 open BAR.term, etc.)
• Visor should show up in Quicksilver and jump to the windowshade directly
• An option to set the CapsLock key as activation key, pref. as kernel module so there would be no need to start the terminal before use.
• Let § (key to the left of 1 on an Apple keyboard) work as the activation key, ala Quake.
• An alternate key combination to bring it up as a single line would also be cool for /really/ quick commands.
• Single click on menu item to show/hide Visor (modifier key or click-and-hold to access menu)
• Add option so that it does not get dismissed when clicking out of the Visor. (This, so that one could copy-and-paste from/to other windows without re-Visoring.) (Perhaps a “pin” in the lower left corner to toggle pinning.)
• Esc key to make Visor dissapear (instead of hitting the hotkey which bring visor up).
• Maybe let Cmd-W dismiss the Visor? (Some have Cmd-W on a mouse button; good if it worked in all apps.) Or Cmd-H? (You can use Control-D just like in Terminal.app to 'logout' of the current session, which dismisses Visor)
• It would be great if there would be an option to have Visor appear when command-tabbing to the Terminal, because this is the normal way to get to it. I find myself constantly command-tabbing to the Terminal even with Visor enabled. Would also be logical since command-tabbing out of Visor closes it.
• There should be a way to disable the Terminal.app dock icon when Visor is enabled.
• An option for disabling regular Terminal-windows and bring up a Visor-window when Terminal.app is launched or activated would be awesome.
• Allowing Visor to be launched and dismissed by hot-corners (like Expose).

• Respect TerminalColors preference for ANSI colors, which is stored as TCColorArray.
• Preference for how large the Visor is. (So you could set it to the whole screen) Perhaps it could allow you to drag the border up and down the screen. (see section on window options above) (Why not just resize visor using terminal's window settings? also useful for removing scrollbar where horizontal = 212, 213)
• Support for multiple terminal sessions (why not use GNU screen instead?)
• If you have a quartz background in Visor, it plays from the very beginning everytime Visor is shown again – would be nice if hiding Visor merely pauses the quartz animation
• It would be nice if Visor set an environment variable so that I could make my cursor a ”> ” symbol like in the Quake console. (I want to be able to do this for just Visor, not for anything else)

• Option to set 'Show icon in menu bar'
• A more direct method of adjusting “Window Settings” to separate them from Terminal.app's defaults (cf. multi-step workarounds regarding transparency in the Ars Technica forum thread). Perhaps this could be implemented as an item in the Visor menu item list and/or as a control in the Visor preference proposed in the above feature request.
• Would also be nice to be able to set either the width of the drop down, or lef and right margin sizes that it would honor on either side of the drop down.
• Option to respect Dock position and leave it uncovered
• Window settings within Preferences
• Preference to suppress the window/shell opened when Terminal is launched. With Visor, who needs it! See here and here.
• Ability to specify which display in a multiple display setup rather than defaulting to whichever a terminal is open on (example: always open on main display)

• Add an easy way to reset the Visor window, clearing its text and command history, and resetting the scrollbar back to 0. (Maybe using a shortcut key). At the moment, even using 'clear' in the Visor window leaves the command history in place, and working for a long time in Visor leaves a long trail of commands, making scrolling difficult.
• Check for updates
• Suppress the entry in console.log each time Visor is activated/deactivated (although I understand it might be for debugging purpose at this point)
• There is a way to combine it with a hacked Terminal to get Visor feeling like a real backgournd Applikation! here
• Use iTerm instead of Terminal (mainly just so I don't need to run Terminal, but also so I have the same settings in visor and my iTerm windows).
• Have the Terminal cd to the directory of the topmost Finder window on Visor fade in. That way if you browse your files and say want to move all *.avis you can do not have to cd (or type) the directory first. I suppose this feature should be triggered by another hotkey to avoid annoyance and unexpected results.

• Preference to hide the menu item to reduce clutter, possibly adding a Visor preference in one of the regular menus? added in 1.2
• Preference selection for transition effects (fade vs scroll back up) added in 1.2
• Vertical size adjustment with a screen height % option in preferences and/or a bar at the bottom to drag to make it larger/smaller. As of 1.2, respects 'number of lines' preferences