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A drop-down terminal pops up from the top of the screen in video game console fashion and can be toggled with a single hotkey. Applications such as Yakuake, Guake or Tilda provide drop-down terminal functionality for the regular desktop environments. With awesome and the power of lua, however, we can mimic this functionality and still use our precious light-weight terminal applications.

Adding the following function to your rc.lua and calling it in a keybinding will create a new window for the drop-down terminal when it does not exist, and will toggle between hidden and visible if one does exist. The first argument is the program to run (eg. “urxvtc”), the second argument is the height (absolute pixels when > 1 or a height percentage when < 1, 0.2 (20% of the screen height) by default), and the third argument is the screen to toggle on. The second and third arguments are optional.

-- This function is for awesome versions prior to 3.4

dropdown = {}

function dropdown_toggle(prog, height, s)
   if s == nil then s = mouse.screen end
   if height == nil then height = 0.2 end
   
   if not dropdown[prog] then
      -- Create table
      dropdown[prog] = {}
      
      -- Add unmanage hook for dropdown programs
      awful.hooks.unmanage.register(function (c)
                                       for scr, cl in pairs(dropdown[prog]) do
                                          if cl == c then
                                             dropdown[prog][scr] = nil
                                          end
                                       end
                                    end)
   end
   
   if not dropdown[prog][s] then
      spawnw = function (c)
                  -- Store client
                  dropdown[prog][s] = c
                  
                  -- Float client
                  awful.client.floating.set(c, true)
                  
                  -- Get screen geometry
                  screengeom = screen[s].workarea
                  
                  -- Calculate height
                  if height < 1 then
                     height = screengeom.height*height
                  end

                  -- I like a different border with for the popup window
                  -- So I don't confuse it with terminals in the layout
                  bw = 2

                  -- Resize client
                  c:geometry({
                                x = screengeom.x,
                                y = screengeom.y - 1000,
                                width = screengeom.width - bw, 
                                height = height - bw
                             })

                  -- Mark terminal as ontop
                  --            c.ontop = true
                  --            c.above = true
                  c.border_width = bw

                  -- Focus and raise client
                  c:raise()
                  client.focus = c

                  -- Remove hook
                  awful.hooks.manage.unregister(spawnw)
               end

      -- Add hook
      awful.hooks.manage.register(spawnw)

      -- Spawn program
      awful.util.spawn(prog)

      dropdown.currtag = awful.tag.selected(s)
   else
      -- Get client
      c = dropdown[prog][s]
      
      -- Switch the client to the current workspace

      -- Focus and raise if not hidden
      if c.hidden then
         awful.client.movetotag(awful.tag.selected(s), c)
         c.hidden = false
         c:raise()
         client.focus = c
      else
         if awful.tag.selected(s) == dropdown.currtag then
            c.hidden = true
            local ctags = c:tags()
            for i, t in pairs(ctags) do
               ctags[i] = nil
            end
            c:tags(ctags)
         else
            awful.client.movetotag(awful.tag.selected(s), c)
            c:raise()
            client.focus = c
         end
      end
      dropdown.currtag = awful.tag.selected(s)
   end
end