Tilda

Tilda is a drop-down terminal for Linux, written in C with GTK and the VTE terminal widget and licensed under GPLv2 or later. Instead of behaving like a normal window, it slides down from the top of the screen when you press a hotkey and hides again on the next press. It is for people on Xorg desktops who want a terminal one keystroke away and prefer a small C program to a larger desktop-specific one.

Several instances can run at once, each with its own hotkey (F1 for the first, F2 for the second, and so on) and its own configuration file at ~/.config/tilda/config_N, following the XDG Base Directory specification. The first run opens a configuration wizard, and the preferences dialog covers the hotkey, window size and position, appearance, colors, title and startup command, and a list-based keybindings page. Any key combination GTK can grab works as the toggle key, such as grave for the backtick key or <Shift><Ctrl>A.

Each instance has tabs: Shift+Ctrl+T opens one, Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown switch between them, and Shift+Ctrl+W closes the current tab. Since version 1.3 there is a search bar (Ctrl+Shift+F by default) that searches forwards and backwards, optionally case-sensitive or by regular expression. tilda --help lists the command-line options.

Tilda only works on Xorg-based desktops. On Wayland it runs through XWayland, and because global hotkeys are not available there, it can be started with --dbus and toggled with tilda -T 0 (or -T 1 for the second instance) from a shortcut configured in the desktop environment. It has no split panes, and rendering comes from VTE, so there is no GPU renderer, font ligatures or image protocol support.