Switching terminal styles in iTerm 2

Question

Recently I've been trying to become more efficient at the command line, and stumbled upon iTerm 2 a couple days ago. One feature of iTerm 2 is that windows can appear from the top of the screen, so if I press Contol-Command-T while I'm using any other application, I can have a transparent command line appear from the top, which has proven itself to be quite useful.

However, I have often brought up the terminal window from the top of the screen, and later, while editing some code in vim or during an ssh session, wanted to switch to fullscreen or a normal window, while keeping my current window's state. Is there a built-in way to switch the style from top of the screen to normal window without having to type in all of my previous commands to get to where I was before?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

If you're serious about terminal work, I would suggest looking at tmux, especially as new builds of iTerm 2 come with it precompiled in (though I use the 'vanilla' version). In your case, if you were using tmux you could detach the current session from the window you're in, and then reattach in a new one (i.e., full screen), or just have multiple windows attached to the same session. There are some other advantages to using tmux, but I'm sure you'll discover them as you're using the program more.

Alternatively, have iTerm show the tab bar even if you only have one tab (make sure Appearance > Hide tab bar… is unchecked), and then you can 'pull' the tab out into its own window to continue using it.