COSMIC Toggle Terminal (CTT)

A CLI utility that toggles a terminal window show/hide on the COSMIC desktop (Wayland-only), bound to a hotkey such as F12. The utility drives the compositor's existing window-management protocol, an it works arbitrary terminal as long as the terminal an set an appid/class. This is a utility control to raise-and-focus /minimize a wayland terminal app rather than a slide-in overlay.

The default terminal that this works with is Alacritty. Ironically, 'alacritty' is used as the hardcoded terminal for this as 'cosmic-terminal' doesn't have the options to do this (as of v1.4.0) at the moment. Other terminals could be supported.

1. Triggering it with a hotkey

Bind the hotkey in COSMIC Settings → Keyboard → Custom shortcuts, with the command set to invoke this CLI (e.g. cosmic-toggle-term). COSMIC custom shortcuts can spawn arbitrary commands, so no key-grabbing logic lives in the binary. F12 is a reasonable default but any free binding works.

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2. Use case

1. User configures a COSMIC custom keyboard shortcut (e.g. F12) to run this CLI. The compositor invokes the CLI on each keypress — the CLI itself does not grab the key.

2. On each invocation the CLI looks at the current set of open windows and decides, for a target terminal:

   • Not running → launch it (a "run" / spawn).
   • Running but not focused → raise and focus it — popup.
   • Running and currently focused/visible → hide it (minimize) — popdown.

   The utility will also bring the terminal into the current workspace if its active or minimiezed in a different cosmic workspace.

3. The CLI does its work and exits. It is a short-lived process, not a daemon.

The target terminal is identified by its app_id (default util.termtoggle.popup), which is set at launch via the terminal's --class flag and never changes at runtime.

Out of scope

• Setting an arbitrary position or size for the window.
• Pinning the window permanently above everything (always-on-top / overlay layer). activate raises to the top of normal windows at the moment it is called; focusing another window drops it back. A true quake-style slide-over would require a different design path.

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3. References

• COSMIC protocol definitions and Rust bindings: pop-os/cosmic-protocols (the cosmic-toplevel-info and cosmic-toplevel-management protocols).
• Window behavior (run-or-raise, minimize toggle) implemented in Python over the same protocols: lapause/cosmic-ext-window-helper. https://github.com/lapause/cosmic-ext-window-helper
• Reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/COSMICDE/comments/1rpvn69/question_regarding_compositor_scriptability