drop-term

A drop-down terminal applet for the COSMIC desktop, inspired by Yakuake and Terminator.

Built on alacritty_terminal for the terminal emulation core, rendered with a custom canvas in libcosmic.

Features

• Drop-down terminal anchored to the top of the screen, toggled from the panel icon
• Preferences panel (gear icon, left of the first tab) with a click-to-pick color chart for the user@host and current-directory portions of the shell prompt.
• Toggle the applet from anywhere on the desktop via an OS-level keyboard shortcut (see below)

Installing

Requires a Rust toolchain and just.

just install

Installs the binary to ~/.local/bin and the desktop entry to ~/.local/share/applications (override the prefix with PREFIX=...). Add the applet to your panel from COSMIC Settings once installed.

just uninstall

System-wide keyboard shortcut

1. Open COSMIC Settings → Keyboard → Custom Shortcuts.
2. Add a shortcut with command pkill -SIGUSR1 -x drop-term and whatever key binding you'd like.

Keybindings

Standard shell/readline shortcuts (Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+R, Alt+F/Alt+B, arrow-key history, Tab completion, etc.) all work normally and are handled by your shell, not listed here. The applet adds the following on top:

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+O	Split pane horizontally
Ctrl+Shift+E	Split pane vertically
Ctrl+Shift+Q	Close active pane
Ctrl+Shift+Z	Next pane
Ctrl+Shift+X	Previous pane
Ctrl+Shift+T	New tab
Ctrl+Shift+W	Close tab
Ctrl+Tab	Next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Previous tab
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy selection
Ctrl+Shift+V	Paste
F12	Hide the dropdown (only while it already has focus)

This same table is also shown inside the Preferences panel (gear icon in the tab bar).