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 · 3h 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.
DrewRWx · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Interesting. Pretty sure it was called the 'console' in Quake. Guess it's a microscopic step from 'console' to 'terminal'.
numpad0 · 2h 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.
WeZzyNL · 3h ago
I think this kind of functionality has been called "Quake Terminal" for quite some time now...
kgen · 1h ago
Totally agree, I even grew up in the quake/dn3d era and wasn't familiar with the term either!
jamesnorden · 3h ago
It's a "Quake-style terminal", much like Guake or Yakuake, no need to be pedantic.
_0xdd · 2h 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.
un1970ix · 2h ago
My iPhone, which has one of the most recent chips, is burning hot right now.
Insanity · 1h ago
Glad to see this comment. Same happened to my iPhone and the website was laggy - was super confused at first..
asdff · 1h ago
All 12 cores on my machine pegged. Sites like this should be studied.
bede · 1h ago
Just watched my iPhone 15 battery drop 2% scrolling for <60s
No comments yet
spiderfarmer · 1h ago
It's the useless canvas element.
Aaronmacaron · 2h 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 · 3h ago
No comment on the app, but the website was not scrolling smoothly on my iPhone 15 Pro.
disconcision · 3h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h ago
My iPhone 13 almost overheated…
BolexNOLA · 2h ago
“Huh let’s what everyone talking about!”
opens site, phone begins roasting
“I don’t know what I expected.”
lovehashbrowns · 33m 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.
hagbard_c · 20m ago
Odd, I see no performance problems at all on Firefox on Linux, this must be a Blink/Webkit thing.
jonplackett · 2h ago
Yeah I started to literally feel the heat in my fingertips and had to eject!
addaon · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
arendtio · 1h 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
arendtio · 1h 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.
wredcoll · 1h 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?
tanepiper · 2h ago
$7 for something that can be done for free in iTerm
asdff · 1h ago
Or just a keyboard shortcut to bring up the terminal
jzellis · 3h 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.
felineflock · 1h ago
I thought this was to run Quake on that little black section at the top of the MacBook screen.
jonplackett · 2h ago
That website almost set my phone on fire
rileytg · 2h ago
i restarted my phone thinking something was wrong with it
paulryanrogers · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Microsoft also owns id/ZeniMax, the owners of the copyright.
PokemonNoGo · 3h 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 · 2h ago
This won't work for iPhones. It requires osx.
ttmb · 2h 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.
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.
DrewRWx · 1h 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!
No comments yet
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.”
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.
It just does not look as smooth as QuakeNotch :-D
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...
https://www.karam.io/blog/2018/turning-i-term-in-to-a-quake-...
That's just hilarious :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.)