There’s no doubt that ConEmu is an awesome console emulator for Windows. However, it has a lesser known feature that makes it awesome. What is that feature? Quake Style!

For anyone that played Quake, you’ll likely remember that CTRL+~ would drop down a console where you could type all sorts of commands. You could do just about anything with that console! The thing isn’t what you could do, however, but how it did it. See, the beauty of the Quake console was that it used an intuitive hotkey that made it there when you needed it and went completely away when you didn’t.

The developer of ConEmu recognized the value in the system and thankfully gave us a way to bring that awesome UI idea to Windows.

Update 2015-03-26

If you’re an iTerm user you can get a similar effect by opening Preferences -> Keys and picking a Hotkey to show/hide system-wide. Be careful to pick something OTHER than the keys you used for ConEmu (if applicable) as they will conflict.