I asked this question on Superuser.com after experiencing this problem. Now it’s accessible to everyone.

When something goes wrong and you run out of memory on Mac OS X, the system puts your existing applications to pause to prevent the system from becoming unstable. After taking care of the problem and freeing more memory, you might notice that the applications you had are still frozen. To unpause them, find their PID using ps and use the kill command to revive it (irony)

kill -CONT 111

Of course, 111 here is replaced with the PID you found with ps

I was used to the convenience of drop-down terminals like Visor in Mac or Yakuake in Linux and needed something similar in Windows.

It turns out, it is possible to achieve almost the same effects in Windows with the use of 2 tools.

• AutoHotkey -  lets you run scripts triggered by hotkeys anywhere in Windows
• Console – is a terminal app that lets you run a custom shell with no title bar, no borders, transparency etc.

Follow these steps to get it working:

1. Download Console and put it somewhere (ie. C:\Program Files\Console2\)
2. Make sure it’s in your %path% system environment (Right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced system settings, Advanced, Environment Variables)
3. Run it, go to Edit -> Settings. Change the settings to suit your taste
   • Change your shell to PowerShell at C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe for Windows 7 and change your startup dir
   • Change the window size columns to take up most of your screen
   • Windows fonts suck, try Andale Mono or Monaco
   • Make sure initial position is at 0, 0 and always on top
   • Under Appearance -> More…, make sure it has no menu, no toolbar, no caption, not resizable, no border, no taskbar, no tray icon for minimal footprint
   • Set your transparency
4. Download AutoHotkey and install it
5. Download this script to your Startup foler, change the hotkey to what you want to use in the script. It is initially Ctrl-`
6. Run the script and press your hotkey
7. Boom, you got a terminal at your fingertip

Sources: [1] [2]

This bugged me today so here’s the one line solution

open .

So after applying the Perfect Visor from my previous blog post, this can be even faster to navigate to awkward Mac style directories than remembering the even more awkward Finder key combo to “Go to Folder”

open ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/

Because you can tab-complete or to go hidden folders

Update: Visor Terminal is now TotalTerminal. It’s a lot easier to configure so you can just download TotalTerminal and perform the steps below starting at 6.

The Visor Terminal, one of my most used hack-features. This guide helps you put your Mac Terminal to the zenith of usability and convenience.

Visor Terminal

The drop-down Quake-style terminal window is extremely convenient to run commands without disrupting the current workflow. Unfortunately the default install is very messy. It needs an open terminal program running in the background which can’t be closed and takes up valuable Dock space.

Then comes a blog from David Zülke who solved the problem with a hack which essentially creates a second terminal program, links the visor extension to it and makes that second terminal always invisible and not appearing in the Dock by playing with the Info.plist file. The world was beautiful until I bought a new Macbook and tried to reinstall Visor but only to find out that his instructions are no longer hosted. So here are the instructions again for those who want a Perfect Visor. This is for version 1.5 – 2.2 which runs on Leopard – Snow Leopard.

1. Install SIMBL
2. This is not necessary but it’s a lot easier if you have XCode to use its .plist editor tool.
3. Right-click the extracted “Visor” file, select “Show Package Contents” and double-click “Info.plist” in the “Contents” folder[1]. Go to Root, SIMBLTargetApplications, 0 and change BundleIdentifier to “com.apple.VisorTerminal”. Save and close. You can now install the bundle according to the Visor install instructions (i.e. move it to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins or the “global” equivalent in /Library).
4. Go to your Applications/Utilities folder and duplicate Terminal. Rename the copy to “VisorTerminal”, then right-click it and choose “Show Package Contents”, and double-click “Info.plist” in the “Contents” folder. Go to Root and change CFBundleIdentifier to “com.apple.VisorTerminal”. Save and close.
5. Start VisorTerminal. Go to Terminal menu and click Visor Preferences. Customize it to your suiting.
6. Make it run on start up. You can right click the VisorTerminal on Dock and choose “Open at Login”
7. Make it invisible. Right-click the VisorTerminal, choose “Show Package contents” and double-click Info.plist in the Contents folder. Add a new Sibling inside the root element called LSUIElement, it must be of type “Number” and have the value “1″ (without the quotes, of course). Save and quit.
8. Done and done! Now the Visor will start on startup and won’t show up anywhere until you press the hotkey.  If you don’t like your previous preferences, you can’t right click or use menu anymore but pressing cmd-, will bring up the preferences window for the terminal

Currently, there’s a bug with SIMBL 0.97 that causes the application to stop using SIMBL when LSUIElement is set to 1. To solve this issue, use AppleScript with the following command:

tell application "VisorTerminal"
	inject SIMBL into Snow Leopard
	activate
end tell

Then save the script as a .app in a desired location. Make this run at startup instead of VisorTerminal.

The next steps are optional but your default Darwin terminal prompt  looks like shit. Here’s how to customize it.

1. Press your hotkey or open Terminal
2. Go to your home directory

   cd ~

   You are there by default

3. Change your profile file

   mate .bash_profile

   TextMate is my favorite editor. If you don’t use it, use nano instead of mate

4. Type

   export PS1 = " "

   And customize your prompt with the following keywords between the quotes

   • \d – Current date
   • \t – Current time
   • \h – Host name
   • \# – Command number
   • \u – User name
   • \W – Current working directory (ie: Desktop/)
   • \w – Current working directory, full path (ie: /Users/Admin/Desktop)

   ie.

   export PS1="\u@\h\w: "

5. Save and restart your terminal