My disappointing run of finding cool-apps-which-only-run-on-mac continues and lately it has been Visor. Visor is a beauty which brings system wide terminal facility. For a die-hard quake fan, this resembles the cool console window which used to drop down upon pressing the tilde(~) key. Although there isn’t anything new on the functionality aspect with Visor, it just increases your cool-quotient. 
This once again happened to be only for OS X, thereby making me suffer even more for having to run Windows.
Let’s clarify some things while we are at this. I don’t “hate” Windows. In fact, I believe Microsoft has started releasing some awesome products of their own like Photosynth and Windows Vista (Yes! No matter what everyone else think, I believe Vista is very stable and an extremely good OS. About Vista requiring hell-lotta memory, since when has hardware, in particular memory, become a constraint?).
Ok, now coming back to Visor, I for one would have loved to have an app similar to Visor on Windows. But after searching the web (I refrain from using the word ‘googling’) for days together, I was.. well.. how do I phrase this.. pissed off! I could not find anything even close to what I was trying to find. I was so irritated to the core that I thought of writing my own “Visor for Windows” (thought of naming it Phobos.. Hehe..)
Phobos
I ain’t that good at COM and Windows Programming and I am average in Java and after searching the web for any help that I could find, I learnt that embedding a command prompt onto a JFrame is no easy task. JDIC has some libraries to embed browsers into JFrames, but not generic enough though. So I scrapped the idea of using Java to achive this (Disappointment++). Later learnt about Python and COM and instantly I could see hope. Wrote a small Python script to spawn command prompt using the win32com.client module. Although I knew it was heading no where, I was atleast happy that I tried.
Scrapping the idea of developing “Phobos”, I came across this article on “Drop Down”, Quake-style command prompt for Windows. It was exactly what I was looking out for. It uses Console, which I’m already a fan of, and AutoHotKey. The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to achieve this and I added my own flavor on top of that to come up with this. It was one heck of a day
Phobos
and I’m proud of it!
Peace!
PS: Did I mention that Visor is written by Nicholas Jitkoff a.k.a QuickSilver guy!
Filed under: Apple, Mac OS X | Leave a Comment
No Responses Yet to “Visor (System Wide Terminal Window) and The Wind’oh way”