HotKeyTerminal

Some Mac developers I talk to like doing little hacks, they like programming little customize-the-system stuff.

I understand this: it’s cool, fun, relaxing, a nice way to take a break from the bigger problems of working on an application.

But I myself almost never do this kind of thing. Except recently I did.

I wanted a global keyboard shortcut for launching Terminal or bringing it to the front. I could have chosen from any number of launchers and utilities that make this possible, but I realized I just wanted this one, simple thing—so I wrote HotKeyTerminal which does this one simple thing.

It runs in the background (no dock icon). I made it a startup item so it’s always there. And now whenever I hit cmd-escape, Terminal comes to the front.

There’s an excellent chance you don’t need this, since it was really just written for me. It’s not an official Ranchero Software release, it’s completely unsupported—I’ll probably never mention it again. But you can download the app or the (extremely simple) source.