QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch
55 comments
·July 20, 2025staplung
coolsunglasses
"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.
https://github.com/Guake/guake
https://babbagefiles.xyz/quake-drop-down-terminal-history/
Yakuake, Kuake (2003), etc.
staplung
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
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
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
Interesting. Pretty sure it was called the 'console' in Quake. Guess it's a microscopic step from 'console' to 'terminal'.
numpad0
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
I think this kind of functionality has been called "Quake Terminal" for quite some time now...
kgen
Totally agree, I even grew up in the quake/dn3d era and wasn't familiar with the term either!
jamesnorden
It's a "Quake-style terminal", much like Guake or Yakuake, no need to be pedantic.
_0xdd
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
My iPhone, which has one of the most recent chips, is burning hot right now.
Insanity
Glad to see this comment. Same happened to my iPhone and the website was laggy - was super confused at first..
vanc_cefepime
Scrolling through the site (iPhone 14 Pro) was like playing a modern game at 15 frames per second.
asdff
All 12 cores on my machine pegged. Sites like this should be studied.
null
spiderfarmer
It's the useless canvas element.
Aaronmacaron
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
No comment on the app, but the website was not scrolling smoothly on my iPhone 15 Pro.
disconcision
it brought my 16-core desktop with 24gb GPU to a crawl, perhaps the only time a website has done that. impressive tbh
badlucklottery
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
My iPhone 13 almost overheated…
BolexNOLA
“Huh let’s what everyone talking about!”
opens site, phone begins roasting
“I don’t know what I expected.”
lovehashbrowns
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
Odd, I see no performance problems at all on Firefox on Linux, this must be a Blink/Webkit thing.
jonplackett
Yeah I started to literally feel the heat in my fingertips and had to eject!
addaon
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
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
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
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
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
$7 for something that can be done for free in iTerm
mbirth
The website says $14 for me now.
asdff
Or just a keyboard shortcut to bring up the terminal
jzellis
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
I thought this was to run Quake on that little black section at the top of the MacBook screen.
jonplackett
That website almost set my phone on fire
rileytg
i restarted my phone thinking something was wrong with it
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.]