RexTerm

Cross-platform drop-down terminal for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It can float down from the top of the screen like Guake or run as a normal terminal window.

We wanted to just fork Guake, but the Linux-first codebase proved too difficult to adapt across platforms. A Qt6 + winpty core worked immediately on Windows, so we built a new app that follows Guake's spirit while targeting all major desktops.

Features

• Drop-down quake-style terminal or standard windowed terminal
• PyQt6 UI with tabs and configurable shortcuts
• Truecolor/TERM export and scrollback via pyte + platform-appropriate PTY backend
• Global hotkey for toggling the quake window (Windows only)
• Settings dialog for fonts, themes, quake behavior, and shortcuts
• Command execution capabilities
• Command history with up/down arrow navigation
• Keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C for interrupt, Ctrl+L to clear)
• Proper terminal I/O handling through winpty
• Threading for asynchronous operations

Dependencies

• Python 3.8+
• PyQt6
• pywinpty (Windows only)
• ptyprocess (Unix-like systems)

Installation (Windows / MSYS2 examples)

# UCRT64
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-python-pyqt6 mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-python-pywinpty

# CLANG64
pacman -S mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-python-pyqt6 mingw-w64-clang-x86_64-python-pywinpty

Installation (Linux)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Installation (macOS)

./install_macos.sh

Usage

Run the app:

python gui_shell.py

Notes

• Default behavior follows Guake: quake-style drop-down when enabled, otherwise a standard window.
• On Windows the PTY layer uses winpty; on Unix-like systems it uses ptyprocess for cross-platform PTY support.
• Global hotkey functionality is now available cross-platform using the keyboard library.
• On macOS, you may need to grant accessibility permissions for global hotkeys to work. Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility, and add your Python application or terminal.
• In MSYS2/MinGW environments, pywinpty is installed as 'winpty'
• The winpty module has a different API than standard pywinpty:
  • Uses pywinpty.ptyprocess.PtyProcess instead of pywinpty.spawn_process
  • Read and write methods have different signatures
• Terminal might close prematurely under certain conditions
• The winpty API doesn't directly support resizing
• Reading from the terminal requires careful handling of timing and availability