Quake-style drop-down terminal in StumpWM

One thing I’ve missed in StumpWM is a Quake-style drop-down terminal, like what Guake provides (and I have a Lua-one in my AwesomeWM config). It may be that I’m still haven’t fully absorbed the StumpWM-mindset and that I should be doing this a different way. But up until now when I’m using StumpWM I’ve tended to end up with a heap of terminal windows that are a pain to navigate through (I have a run-or-raise command associated with xterm, but it starts from the first xterm window and usually I want the last – something else to figure out how to do). It’s nice to have a ‘working terminal’ that one can quickly summon and dismiss.

There’s a number of issues for creating a Quake-type drop-down in StumpWM (at least based on my current knowledge). The first is fairly easily dealt with - I don’t want more than one Quake terminal around.

run-or-raise will prevent multiple instances from being created:

(defcommand urxvt () ()
  "Start an urxvt instance or switch to it, if it is already running."
  (run-or-raise "urxvt"'(:title "urxvt")))

(I’m cheating here a bit because I’m not quite sure how to handle title-management. I know windows can be retitled, and I initially tried setting the window title in the above function to “quake”, but somehow I ended up also sporadically re-titling other windows as “quake”, so I’ve side-stepped the whole issue by just using urxvt for my drop-down terminal, with my regular terminal being xterm.)

What we want then is a function that toggles our Quake terminal on-and-off: essentially if the current window is not urxvt, then call the urxvt function defined above, and if the current window is urxvt then switch back to the last used window before urxvt was called. The basic thing we need for this is (if (equal (window-title (current-window)) "urxvt").

The trouble is that StumpWM has a nice feature which is similar to doing C-x b RET in Emacs: it essentially switches to the last window used, so it can be a nice feature for switching back and forth between two different windows you’re working in. The function is pull-hidden-other and it is invoked with “prefix prefix”, which for me is s-f s-f (Super+F, twice), but by default is C-t C- (Ctrl+t twice). Why this creates a problem is because our Quake terminal will muck that up because it will often end up being the last used window, and that’s not what I want. I want pull-hidden-other to switch to the last used window that’s not the Quake drop-down.

I tried a number of different things, and this may still not be the best solution, but it works:

(defcommand rxvt-quake () ()
  "Toggle rxvt-quake window."
  (if (equal (window-title (current-window)) "urxvt")   ; if the current window is quake
      (progn
	(other-window)    ; switch back to window quake was called from
	(select-window-by-number *real-other-window*)  ; switch to the 'real' "other-window"
	(other-window))  ; switch back to the original window - this way after quake finishes, the original configuration is restored
      (progn          ; otherwise, if the current window is NOT quake
      (other-window)   ; first switch the current "other-window"
	(if (not (equal (window-title (current-window)) "urxvt")) ; if the current
								  ; "other-window" is
								  ; quake itself, do
								  ; nothing
	    (setf *real-other-window* (window-number (current-window)))) ; otherwise store the window-number of the current other-window
	(other-window) ; switch back to the window originally called from
	(urxvt)))) ; run-or-raise urxvt

So this function indeed checks to see whether the current window is our Quake drop-down terminal. If it’s not, it first switches to the currently last used window with (other-window) and stores the number of this window in *real-other-window* (but only if this last-used-window isn’t itself urxvt - otherwise we’ll sometime end up ‘over-writing’ the actual last-used-window we want to keep). It then switches back to window that was active when rxvt-quake was invoked, and then it calls the urxvt function which either launches a new urxvt (if none currently exists), or raises the currently running urxvt window. Storing the value in *real-other-window* gives us a way to remember what the ‘real’ last-used window should be.

If rxvt-quake is invoked while the Quake urxvt drop-down is the currently active window, then first (other-window) is invoked, switching us back to the window that was active before we called the drop-down terminal, then we switch to our stored window (which was the ‘real’ last-used window before Quake was invoked), and then we switch back with (other-window) to the window that was active when Quake was first invoked.

This way the window configuration that existed before we summoned our Quake drop-down terminal is restored, and pull-hidden-other effectively ignores the Quake drop-drop.

Bind this command to the traditional F12 with:

(define-key *top-map* (kbd "F12") "rxvt-quake")

And you’re got a ‘traditional’ Quake drop-down terminal in StumpWM.

It is a ‘full-length’ drop-down terminal, however. It might be nice to have it be a fraction of the screen like a more traditional Quake drop-down.