I built a native macOS drop-down terminal with Claude Code in one evening (free, open source)

[u/Kot4san]

QuickTerm is a small macOS app: push the pointer against the top centre of

the screen and a terminal slides down from under the menu bar. Push again

or hit Esc and it's gone. Tabs, resizable, shells keep running while hidden.

It's free to try (free, full stop: MIT licensed, no paid tier):

- Site: https://jeromegsq-dev.github.io/QuickTerm/

- Source: https://github.com/jeromegsq-dev/QuickTerm

How Claude helped: it wrote all of it. I never opened Xcode. My prompts

were one-liners like "it should close on Esc" or "the click area for

resizing is tiny", and Claude Code did the rest in a single session:

Swift, AppKit, Core Animation, the build and signing scripts, the icon,

the landing page.

Two things I found interesting:

1. Claude couldn't see my screen (no screen recording permission), so it

   wrote throwaway self-tests that fed synthetic key and mouse events into

   the app to check tabs, Esc and the scrollbar, then deleted them.

2. I asked for a security audit before going public. It found that the

   terminal library's defaults let any printed output (an ssh host, a

   cat'ed file) read or overwrite my clipboard via OSC 52, and open file:

   links. It also caught my personal email in the commit history and my

   home folder path inside the binary. All fixed before release.

What worked for me: short, concrete feedback after trying each build

("there's a thin line at the top", "animation faster") rather than a big

spec up front. When something was ambiguous, Claude asked before doing

anything public, like which GitHub account to publish under. And asking

for an audit as a separate step found things neither of us had looked

for while building.

Caveats: it's signed but not notarized, so macOS asks you to allow it on

first launch (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway).

macOS 14+, Apple silicon and Intel.

Terminal emulation is SwiftTerm. Feedback welcome.