Get Instant Command Line Access from Anywhere in Mac OS with iTerm2

Get Instant Command Line Access from Anywhere in Mac OS with iTerm2

If youre a command line user, you can imagine that itd be useful to have a Terminal window available instantly to you from anywhere on the Mac, whether youre currently in the Finder, Safari, Xcode, or any other application entirely. Well theres no need to imagine, with iTerm you can have an instantly available terminal that drops down from the top of the Macs screen, giving you immediate command line access at the push of a hot key. Maybe you need to quickly , , push git changes, or a remote machine, connect to a remote server with , or any other quick task that requires the . Whatever the need, you can use this great trick to have an immediately available terminal window from anywhere or from within any application in Mac OS. To get the drop-down command line, you will use a third party app called iTerm2, which is a popular third party terminal client for the Mac. Once your hot key is set, you can toggle in and out of the drop-down command line from within any application in Mac OS, as long as iTerm2 is open in the background. The dropdown command line is a standard shell with the full environment, tools, and utilities available to it, just like any other terminal window. Aside from customizing the hot key, you can also customize how the drop-down command line looks by going to iTerm2 Preferences > Profiles > Hotkey Window and modifying the colors, fonts, and other settings as you see fit. Our longtime readers may recall similar posts from quite some time ago about tools like and that have similar functionality, but iTerm2 is unique in that its a universally popular third party terminal application anyway, plus its compatible with all modern Mac OS versions. If having an immediately available command line sounds interesting to you, check out iTerm2 and set up a hotkey, its pretty great!