TotalTerminal doesn't work with full-screen apps

Question

TotalTerminal (former Visor) is an awesome plugin for Terminal that turns it into a Quake-style console that slides down on a key combination.

This is tremendously useful for development because I can type commands while writing code or browsing without extra window hustle.

Unfortunately, TotalTerminal doesn't play well with fullscreen apps. If I put Sublime Text in fullscreen mode and trigger Terminal, Mission Control will scroll to the nearest non-fullscreen space available, and only then will it show the Terminal.

This is very annoying. Is it possible to fix or work around this issue?

Answer 1

This is a known issue and the author doesn't plan to fix it.

I encourage someone to go further and implement it because personally I don't use fullscreen apps right now and I don't plan to fix this anytime soon.

Luckily, there is a workaround described by vvlad.

As an workaround you can set LSUIElement in Terminal's Info.plist

It has several drawbacks but otherwise works like a charm:

• Terminal no longer shows on Dock;
• There is a space the size of the top bar on top of every TotalTerminal visor opened on fullscreen apps windows;
• You can no longer ⌘⇥ to regular Terminal windows;
• You cannot Force Kill Terminal process.

This is how it will look like:

How It Works

LSUIElement (String - Mac OS X) specifies whether the application runs as an agent application. If this key is set to “1”, Launch Services runs the application as an agent application. Agent applications do not appear in the Dock or in the Force Quit window. Although they typically run as background applications, they can come to the foreground to present a user interface if desired. A click on a window belonging to an agent application brings that application forward to handle events.

The Dock and loginwindow are two applications that run as agent applications.

How to Do It

1. Open Terminal (assuming you already have TotalTerminal installed)
2. Run sudo nano /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Info.plist

3. Add these two lines right after opening <dict> tag:

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <true />
   

4. Save and close the file by pressing ^O Enter ^X
5. Quit Terminal and launch it again