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.]
coolsunglasses · 13h ago
"Quake terminal" has been a term of art for a regular terminal that drops down from the top of the screen like the terminal in Quake did for the last 20-22 years. I remember this being a thing when I started using Linux back then.
Oh, interesting. Surprised that I didn't already know that. Perhaps every time I encountered the term "quake terminal" I just assumed it literally meant the the Quake terminal proper.
I'll let my original comment stand since it seems likely that at least some others will have the same impedance mismatch as I did.
In any case, thanks for pointing it out.
antonvs · 8h ago
I’ve been using Linux since 1999 (thanks for the Halloween memos, Microsoft!) and this is the first I’m hearing of Quake terminals. I would also have assumed it involved the actual game somehow.
DrewRWx · 11h ago
No worries, mate! When the popular narrative is "you can run Doom on a pregnancy test" your blind spot tracks.
By the bye, I know Foone hates their threads being posted here, so I won't, but I absolutely adore their hardware and software finagling. It's also made me a better developer!
markus_zhang · 13h ago
I think the much more common name is the console? I never heard about a Quake “terminal” tbh. It has always been the console to input console command.
nottorp · 12h ago
Interesting. Pretty sure it was called the 'console' in Quake. Guess it's a microscopic step from 'console' to 'terminal'.
dSebastien · 3h ago
It never stopped being a thing!! :)
numpad0 · 12h ago
TIL and TIL Windows Terminal supports it, and by default it uses tilde key like the real one that's not available in my keyboard. pain.
stavros · 9h ago
Yeah, never heard the term "quake terminal" before, and I used to play Quake and use Yakuake. Even in Quake it was always the console, never the terminal, because it wasn't a terminal.
mproud · 9h ago
You’re not the only one!
I figured this was the natural evolution of “hacking random device to be able to play DOOM” to “hacking the notch on my computer to play Quake.”
WeZzyNL · 13h ago
I think this kind of functionality has been called "Quake Terminal" for quite some time now...
jamesnorden · 13h ago
It's a "Quake-style terminal", much like Guake or Yakuake, no need to be pedantic.
kgen · 11h ago
Totally agree, I even grew up in the quake/dn3d era and wasn't familiar with the term either!
_0xdd · 12h ago
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.
asdff · 12h ago
All 12 cores on my machine pegged. Sites like this should be studied.
nerdix · 9h ago
Its actually kind of amazing that a landing page can do that to a modern computer.
un1970ix · 12h ago
My iPhone, which has one of the most recent chips, is burning hot right now.
Insanity · 12h ago
Glad to see this comment. Same happened to my iPhone and the website was laggy - was super confused at first..
vanc_cefepime · 10h ago
Scrolling through the site (iPhone 14 Pro) was like playing a modern game at 15 frames per second.
bede · 12h ago
Just watched my iPhone 15 battery drop 2% scrolling for <60s
No comments yet
spiderfarmer · 12h ago
It's the useless canvas element.
pentagrama · 7h ago
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!
Felt this pain last week. The sad fact is that auto-play with looping is only reliable with `<img>` and its formats. WebP can do a bit better than GIF but not nearly as well as MP4.
tpurves · 7h ago
No you were right to be disappointed! I was similarly in a state of excited awe to see someone play actual quake inside the notch of a mac. Much like the noble hacker tradition of getting Doom to run on the most unexpected devices possible. So yes, ID Software games running in weird places is an entirely reasonable expectation!
'just a terminal' is maybe also a legit term of art and entirely useful for somebody out there. But much less cool that we were hoping for!
Aaronmacaron · 12h ago
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.
pityJuke · 13h ago
No comment on the app, but the website was not scrolling smoothly on my iPhone 15 Pro.
disconcision · 13h ago
it brought my 16-core desktop with 24gb GPU to a crawl, perhaps the only time a website has done that. impressive tbh
badlucklottery · 13h ago
Same with Chrome on desktop.
There's an animated background element with shooting stars that seems to be updating per-pixel. The more pixels it draws, like for a high res screen, the slower the page seems to render. I deleted that element and it scrolled smoothly.
0-R-1-0-N · 13h ago
My iPhone 13 almost overheated…
BolexNOLA · 12h ago
“Huh let’s what everyone talking about!”
opens site, phone begins roasting
“I don’t know what I expected.”
lovehashbrowns · 10h ago
It really is so instant and oddly enough I don’t know if I remember the last time a site roasted my phone in this way.
hypercube33 · 8h ago
How does the dev of this site not catch this kinda thing, serious question
jonplackett · 13h ago
Yeah I started to literally feel the heat in my fingertips and had to eject!
hagbard_c · 10h ago
Odd, I see no performance problems at all on Firefox on Linux, this must be a Blink/Webkit thing.
trostaft · 9h ago
I doubt it, since I saw it on my firefox+linux machine. Perhaps hardware? I was using AMD CPU + graphics.
hagbard_c · 9h ago
Intel i7-6820HQ CPU/Graphics on a 9yo Thinkpad P50 which does have an NVidia Quadro M2000M but I only use it when needed through Prime. Firefox Nightly 141.0a1. Showing the animation at the top of the page runs up the GPU to 20%, repeatedly scrolling up and down the page using the scrollbar can get it up to about 75%. Scrolling remains smooth but sometimes the content on the top of the page takes a second to appear.
arendtio · 12h ago
As a long-time Yakuake fan, I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that iTerm2 can also be configured to have a quake-like terminal window.
It just does not look as smooth as QuakeNotch :-D
addaon · 12h ago
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.
DrewRWx · 12h ago
This is incredibly constructive feedback!
When working on projects that meld digital and physical realities, ergonomics and aesthetics become a hyperfocus and observations like this are vital for course correcting.
naoru · 9h ago
Thanks, ChatGPT.
jjani · 6h ago
ChatGPT wouldn't have mismatched the singular/plural of "observations" and "this"
DrewRWx · 5h ago
Dang, I hate being authenticated by a grammatical error.
DrewRWx · 7h ago
Bruh, that's all me.
tanepiper · 12h ago
$7 for something that can be done for free in iTerm
cosmic_cheese · 5h ago
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.
Ah, now there’s a popup to use the discount code “MEOW” for 50% off. Didn’t see/notice that before.
asdff · 12h ago
Or just a keyboard shortcut to bring up the terminal
cosmic_cheese · 5h ago
A dropdown is a bit nicer than a simple foregrounding key shortcut is. It never has to be window managed, floats on top of everything else as long as it’s toggled open (even as you’re shuffling through other windows), and makes for a better drop target that benefits from Fitts’ Law.
wredcoll · 11h 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?
sunnybeetroot · 9h ago
Unusable on iPhone safari. Switched to Mac and fans sped up to max.
felineflock · 12h ago
I thought this was to run Quake on that little black section at the top of the MacBook screen.
jzellis · 13h ago
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.
arendtio · 12h ago
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.
jonplackett · 13h ago
That website almost set my phone on fire
rileytg · 13h ago
i restarted my phone thinking something was wrong with it
ttmb · 12h ago
I must be well out of the loop because I had no idea that the notch was anything other than a cosmetic trick to hide the camera.
hamish-b · 8h ago
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?
PokemonNoGo · 13h ago
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...
unsnap_biceps · 13h ago
This won't work for iPhones. It requires osx.
znpy · 1h ago
PSA: you can get a drop-down quake style terminal (a la guake/yakuake) on mac using ghostty for free. I use ghostty uniquely for that feature.
paulryanrogers · 13h ago
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.
OptionX · 13h ago
Windows terminal used the name quake mode for the similar functionality it offers and there of course the Yakuake that does the same on Linux. Haven't heard of anyone rattling the copyright chain about it yet.
eukara · 12h ago
while that may be true, the QuakeNotch logo uses trademarked iconography, at least avoid that:
I suspect there is a legal difference between offering a feature in the style of Quake (and calling it out as such) vs. baking it into your App’s branding.
detectd · 11h ago
Microsoft also owns id/ZeniMax, the owners of the copyright.
dangus · 2h ago
This article just reminds me that Apple is overdue to do something about the notch in the MacBook lineup.
I thought it was so huge because they planned on adding FaceID but that never materialized.
Now it’s just a gigantic notch and it still has the ability to block UI elements and completely break the functionality of the menu bar unless you plug in an external monitor.
exabrial · 6h ago
Zero videos of this actually playing Quake.
forrestthewoods · 12h ago
It set my 32 core Threadripper on fire. I’ve never seen a site so laggy and bad that wasn’t because of a thousand ads.
it took me a while... i had to search. macs have notches now? and people think that's ok?
int_19h · 7h ago
Consider the other options:
1. Have a bezel instead. This reduces the overall screen height and pixel count.
2. Have the camera stick above the screen instead. Lenovo did that on some Thinkpads recently. The problem is that it is still sticking out when closed.
2a. Fold the camera somehow. Requires the display to be thick enough to allow that, at least in that one area.
3. Don't have the camera at all.
Given that Macs normally always have the menu bar on top except when the app is completely fullscreen, the first approach makes the most sense - it allows the menu bar to be placed into the space reclaimed by removing the bezel.
asdff · 4h ago
To be honest when you catch a good look at the camera in the glare, it is about the size of the remaining bezel on the mbp. I'm not sure why the camera unit necessarily needs all this vertical buffer space. Maybe they wanted to use an off the shelf camera instead of making something narrower (and perhaps longer) that would fit seamlessly in the display. I expect that is probably coming in a couple years.
crazygringo · 9h ago
It's OK because it lets the screen be bigger.
It's less of adding a notch, more of extending the screen upwards except where the camera is.
It didn't take away from any previous screen real estate.
(It does make something like Bartender even more necessary than before though. It's inexcusable Apple doesn't have a built-in solution for properly handling menu bar icons. But that's still a problem even without the notch.)
asdff · 9h ago
Yeah it sucks. I don't think its OK but I am saddled with it. You kind of forget about it sometimes and other times it's glaring.
teaearlgraycold · 9h ago
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.
DrewRWx · 12h ago
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.)
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.]
https://github.com/Guake/guake
https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
Yakuake, Kuake (2003), etc.
I'll let my original comment stand since it seems likely that at least some others will have the same impedance mismatch as I did.
In any case, thanks for pointing it out.
By the bye, I know Foone hates their threads being posted here, so I won't, but I absolutely adore their hardware and software finagling. It's also made me a better developer!
I figured this was the natural evolution of “hacking random device to be able to play DOOM” to “hacking the notch on my computer to play Quake.”
No comments yet
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/
'just a terminal' is maybe also a legit term of art and entirely useful for somebody out there. But much less cool that we were hoping for!
There's an animated background element with shooting stars that seems to be updating per-pixel. The more pixels it draws, like for a high res screen, the slower the page seems to render. I deleted that element and it scrolled smoothly.
opens site, phone begins roasting
“I don’t know what I expected.”
It just does not look as smooth as QuakeNotch :-D
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.
When working on projects that meld digital and physical realities, ergonomics and aesthetics become a hyperfocus and observations like this are vital for course correcting.
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/
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.
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.
QuakeNotch Logo: https://quakenotch.com/_next/static/media/QuakeNotch.84f1df8...
Trademarks:
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75350547&caseSearchType=U...
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75350175&caseSearchType=U...
I thought it was so huge because they planned on adding FaceID but that never materialized.
Now it’s just a gigantic notch and it still has the ability to block UI elements and completely break the functionality of the menu bar unless you plug in an external monitor.
https://www.karam.io/blog/2018/turning-i-term-in-to-a-quake-...
That's just hilarious :D
1. Have a bezel instead. This reduces the overall screen height and pixel count.
2. Have the camera stick above the screen instead. Lenovo did that on some Thinkpads recently. The problem is that it is still sticking out when closed.
2a. Fold the camera somehow. Requires the display to be thick enough to allow that, at least in that one area.
3. Don't have the camera at all.
Given that Macs normally always have the menu bar on top except when the app is completely fullscreen, the first approach makes the most sense - it allows the menu bar to be placed into the space reclaimed by removing the bezel.
It's less of adding a notch, more of extending the screen upwards except where the camera is.
It didn't take away from any previous screen real estate.
(It does make something like Bartender even more necessary than before though. It's inexcusable Apple doesn't have a built-in solution for properly handling menu bar icons. But that's still a problem even without the notch.)
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.
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.)