Ha! Pretty neat actually for the novelty. Sadly i don't have an iPhone. I've had a Quake terminal on my setup for now 20 years at first because it was oh so cool but now it's so ingrained in my flow i feel lost without one...
Expectation: "Quake terminal" implies playing Quake, possibly in some Asciinema-type way. Maybe just starting the built-in Quake terminal without the game-play.
Reality: a regular terminal that starts in the notch and expands to normal window.
I guess it's somehow based on the terminal that was in Quake but that was only really used for issuing quake commands, not really for being a posix-compliant, VT-100 compatible terminal.
[Update: it was quickly pointed out that "Quake terminal" is a term of art for one line terminal that can easily expand. I am a heavy terminal user but genuinely did not know that term was commonplace. Grumpiness retracted.]
This looks like fun, but it's very easy to set up iTerm 2 to do the same thing. Every computer I use (Mac or Linux) is setup to drop down a terminal whenever I hit F12 - full screen, split in half, with 80% opacity just because it looks cool.
Back in my Quake days we called it the (Quake) console.
That said, they seem to be tempting fate by using "Quake" in the name and a logo very similar to Q1. Especially risky since they appear intent on selling it.
I have never heard the fans on my 2021 16" MBP until I opened this website. GPU usage spiked to 65% when opening the site in Firefox, enough to trigger the fan on this otherwise silent machine.
The iTerm version of the feature is buggy, in my experience. The old haxie[0] Visor/TotalTerminal[1] which patched it into the Apple terminal produced a better result, somehow despite being literal hack.
I wouldn’t be opposed to paying for a dropdown terminal that worked as well as or better than TotalTerminal did.
Cool idea! Unfortunately the terminal doesn't really work when using fish shell. The prompt is always stuck at the top. Also the "artificial" notch is larger than the physical notch and even larger than the menu bar which is mildly unsatisfying and I didn't find an option to adjust the size.
I want to love this, but it's basically an aesthetic experience, and I have two and a half complaints that prevent me from loving it:
1) It needs an option to be the exact height of the menu bar when collapsed. On my system, it's ~4 pts taller then the menu bar, which means it intrudes into the chrome of maximized windows. Ewww. The goal is to reclaim wasted space, not take more!
2) It pretty consistently drops frames when expanding on a system under light memory pressure. Seems like there's likely a few pages that need to be wired to keep it from needing to page in too much on activation? Tracing memory accesses on activation, clustering those functions (with order files) and variables (with linker scripts) to a minimal number of pages, and wiring those pages could make this better. Dropping frames is a bug!
2.5) I don't use my laptop for music. Let me turn off the red "note" that launches Music, because (a) it's useless and (b) it's really buggy for those of us who have never accepted Apple Music terms of service -- full UI lock-up when waiting for permission. Instead, let me put something useful there. A CPU meter would be amazing! Or even better, an indication of whether a terminal is still executing a command / done and ready for input -- not sure how to hook this in general, but would be great.
I think you need a Mac to have a smooth background animation...
Just kidding, Chromium can handle it too; it just seems a bit heavy for Firefox. But sometimes you wonder why on earth you have to add such resource-hungry effects.
I have a hammer and am looking for a nail, but every day something sparks Marshall McLuhan ringing in my head.
The medium truly is the massage. The physical form in which information is being delivered (screen with notch) is beginning to work us over on a concept as old as the terminal.
Yeah, Yakuake; TotalTerminal; and others kept the Quake terminal flame alive, but now that game UI choice interacts with physical reality!
Which reinforces my spicy take...
Spicy take: Skeumorphism is a necessary and probably effective guard rail against tech usage unmooring us from physical reality.
Plus, this augmented reality take on the concept is taking that idea to at least eight strange new places.
Thankfully you don't see an artistic representation of a 3.5 floppy representing an app's "save" function yes-and-ing people into messiah complexes and public mental breakdowns.
All that being said, I am giving this a spin when my work laptop arrives!
(Worst case I use the, mostly(?), iTerm2 functional equivalent because that worked pretty well for my needs when I set it up many moons ago.)
Tangent, but when I load this page it plays a video, which is a nice way to demonstrate a primarily visual thing, but the video has no controls, and specifically no scrubber bar. How do you mess this kind of basic stuff up in 2025? Like, you have to go out of your way to screw that up, right?
Tried it out and it crashed so bad I had to force reset my M3 air.
It has functionality for showing active music. I was clicking around to try and disable this functionality. In doing so it launched Apple Music (software which I never use). MacOS asked for my permission to allow QuakeNotch to control music. I could not click on anything and had a permanent rainbow wheel. The force quit menu did not show QuakeNotch so I needed to hold the power button. That's an instant uninstall for me.
Super cool! I don't see any clear description of what the difference between the pro and the free licenses are. Maybe the website could be updated with that?
I was going to comment that the page video is a GIF and was going to be huge, around 10MB, but surprisingly is 4.28 MB. Still huge, I converted the GIF to MP4 with https://cloudconvert.com/gif-to-mp4 and is 575 KB and the quality is great. It should be more common just use <video> instead of a GIF for many cases.
I noticed that was a GIF because I have an extension to not autoplay GIFs [1], it is great to don't have to see moving stuff without consent. Actually, the extension can be better, I would prefer to have a play button to GIFs/see a "GIF" label on the image, now I have to change the setting of the extension and reload the page. I'm not a developer and try to do the extension with Claude but didn't work, if someone knows an extension with that feature let me know! I looked for it and can't find it, it may be a great opportunity to create one, devs!
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadReality: a regular terminal that starts in the notch and expands to normal window.
I guess it's somehow based on the terminal that was in Quake but that was only really used for issuing quake commands, not really for being a posix-compliant, VT-100 compatible terminal.
[Update: it was quickly pointed out that "Quake terminal" is a term of art for one line terminal that can easily expand. I am a heavy terminal user but genuinely did not know that term was commonplace. Grumpiness retracted.]
That said, they seem to be tempting fate by using "Quake" in the name and a logo very similar to Q1. Especially risky since they appear intent on selling it.
That's just hilarious :D
I wouldn’t be opposed to paying for a dropdown terminal that worked as well as or better than TotalTerminal did.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity [1]: https://totalterminal.binaryage.com/
1) It needs an option to be the exact height of the menu bar when collapsed. On my system, it's ~4 pts taller then the menu bar, which means it intrudes into the chrome of maximized windows. Ewww. The goal is to reclaim wasted space, not take more!
2) It pretty consistently drops frames when expanding on a system under light memory pressure. Seems like there's likely a few pages that need to be wired to keep it from needing to page in too much on activation? Tracing memory accesses on activation, clustering those functions (with order files) and variables (with linker scripts) to a minimal number of pages, and wiring those pages could make this better. Dropping frames is a bug!
2.5) I don't use my laptop for music. Let me turn off the red "note" that launches Music, because (a) it's useless and (b) it's really buggy for those of us who have never accepted Apple Music terms of service -- full UI lock-up when waiting for permission. Instead, let me put something useful there. A CPU meter would be amazing! Or even better, an indication of whether a terminal is still executing a command / done and ready for input -- not sure how to hook this in general, but would be great.
Just kidding, Chromium can handle it too; it just seems a bit heavy for Firefox. But sometimes you wonder why on earth you have to add such resource-hungry effects.
It just does not look as smooth as QuakeNotch :-D
The medium truly is the massage. The physical form in which information is being delivered (screen with notch) is beginning to work us over on a concept as old as the terminal.
Yeah, Yakuake; TotalTerminal; and others kept the Quake terminal flame alive, but now that game UI choice interacts with physical reality!
Which reinforces my spicy take...
Spicy take: Skeumorphism is a necessary and probably effective guard rail against tech usage unmooring us from physical reality.
Plus, this augmented reality take on the concept is taking that idea to at least eight strange new places.
Thankfully you don't see an artistic representation of a 3.5 floppy representing an app's "save" function yes-and-ing people into messiah complexes and public mental breakdowns.
All that being said, I am giving this a spin when my work laptop arrives! (Worst case I use the, mostly(?), iTerm2 functional equivalent because that worked pretty well for my needs when I set it up many moons ago.)
It has functionality for showing active music. I was clicking around to try and disable this functionality. In doing so it launched Apple Music (software which I never use). MacOS asked for my permission to allow QuakeNotch to control music. I could not click on anything and had a permanent rainbow wheel. The force quit menu did not show QuakeNotch so I needed to hold the power button. That's an instant uninstall for me.
I noticed that was a GIF because I have an extension to not autoplay GIFs [1], it is great to don't have to see moving stuff without consent. Actually, the extension can be better, I would prefer to have a play button to GIFs/see a "GIF" label on the image, now I have to change the setting of the extension and reload the page. I'm not a developer and try to do the extension with Claude but didn't work, if someone knows an extension with that feature let me know! I looked for it and can't find it, it may be a great opportunity to create one, devs!
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gifpuase/