TILDA(1)

💖 TILDA(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to tilda — a highly configurable terminal emulator, and yes the manual name is literally just tilda and it's that girl 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

tilda [-b|--background-color color] [-c|--command command] [-h|--hidden]
[-f|--font font] [-g|--config-file file] [-l|--lines file]
[-s|--scrollbar] [-w|--working-dir dir] [-x|--x-pos x_pos] [-y|--y-pos
y_pos] [-t|--background-alpha alpha] [-C|--config] [--display display]

tilda --dbus

tilda -T|--toggle-window [instance_id]

tilda --version

tilda --help

tilda --help-all

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So like, Tilda is a terminal emulator and she is highly configurable — main character energy fr. The whole thing that makes her different? You bind a configurable shortcut to show and hide the tilda window, so you can flip between tilda and your other windows with just keyboard shortcuts. When tilda is hidden she literally moves outside of the screen until you press the pull/toggle shortcut again to bring her back. iconic behavior 💅

You configure how tilda behaves through the preferences dialog, which you get to from the context menu. And a subset of the options can also be set from the command line, as documented below. 🎀

heads up bestie: currently command line options override the settings in the configuration file and are persisted into the configuration file. no cap, they stick around.

On Xorg-based desktops, Tilda uses an X11 filter function to register its hotkeys. On Wayland though, this method only works while other X11-based programs are active — we cannot send hotkeys to tilda while native Wayland applications have the focus. 😭 So on Wayland desktops tilda needs to be started with D-Bus support (i.e., with --dbus) and a global shortcut key must be registered using the desktop environment settings to send a D-Bus action to show or hide the Tilda window. that's the way, trust. ✨

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

🎀 Help Options:

• -?, --help — Show help options.
• --help-all — Show all help options, including D-Bus and GTK options.

💜 Application Options:

• -b, --background-color color — Set the background color. The value can be either a standard color name from X11 or a hexadecimal value (i.e., #rgb, #rrggbb, etc.).
• -c, --command command — Run a command at startup instead of the default shell.
• -h, --hidden — Start Tilda hidden.
• -f, --font font — Set the font to the Pango FontDescription specified in font. Defaults to "Monospace 11".
• -l, --lines lines — The the scrollback buffer size to a maximum of lines. (yes the typo is canon, we keep it 😌)
• -s, --scrollbar — Show a scrollbar at the side of the terminal.
• -v, --version — Print the version, then exit.
• -w, --working-dir dir — Set initial working directory to dir.
• -x, --x-pos x_pos — Set the X position of the tilda terminal window to x_pos.
• -y, --y-pos y_pos — Set the Y position of the tilda terminal window to y_pos.
• -t, --background-alpha alpha — Set the terminal windows transparency to alpha (i.e., 0-100%). Higher values increase the level of transparency.
• -C, --config — Show the configuration wizard.
• --display=DISPLAY — Set the X display to use (i.e., :0, :0.0, etc.).

🦄 D-Bus Options:

• --dbus — Enables D-Bus support (see D-Bus).
• -T, --toggle-window [instance_id] — Toggle a Tilda window with instance_id and exit. If instance_id is not specified it will default to instance 0. This option provides a convenient way to toggle tilda windows on Wayland environments and is equivalent to the longer dbus-send command documented below. It can be used to setup a Keyboard shortcut on a Wayland-based desktop environment which will then toggle the Tilda window. Note, that this option is affected by the "Non-Focus Pull Up Behaviour" setting. 👑

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⭐ NOTES ⭐

🔥 D-Bus

If D-Bus is enabled, then Tilda offers a method on D-Bus to toggle the Tilda Window. Each Tilda process registers its own D-Bus name, so it's possible to run multiple tilda processes each with their own config file and control them separately via D-Bus. 🫶 When D-Bus is enabled, then the pull down shortcut is not registered as an Xorg filter function, and a suitable global shortcut needs to be configured in the desktop environment (see --toggle-window). You may optionally clear the pull shortcut in the settings, if D-Bus support is enabled.

Each Tilda instance registers itself using a dynamically generated bus name and object path using its instance number. The first Tilda instance will be on the bus name:

com.github.lanoxx.tilda.Actions0

with object path:

/com/github/lanoxx/tilda/Actions0

The interface name is always:

com.github.lanoxx.tilda.Actions

To toggle the tilda window you can use the -T|--toggle-window option of tilda:

tilda -T    # toggle default instance (i.e., 0)

tilda -T 0  # explicitly toggle the specified instance (i.e., 0)

Alternatively, you can also use the dbus-send command.

dbus-send --session --type=method_call \
          --dest=com.github.lanoxx.tilda.Actions0 \
          /com/github/lanoxx/tilda/Actions0 \
          com.github.lanoxx.tilda.Actions.Toggle

For each additional tilda instance the bus name and object path will be incremented by one (e.g. Actions1, Actions2, etc.). 🔢

You can use one of the above commands to register a global hotkey in your Wayland session. Under Gnome, this can be done under Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts. 🧚

🍓 FILES

Tilda creates its configuration files under ~/.config/tilda/. For each instance it will create a config file named config_<N>, where <N> starts at 0 and is incremented for each additional process that is started.

Tilda also creates a cache directory under ~/.cache/tilda/locks, where it will create a global lock file named lock_0_0 and additional instance specific lock files named lock_<PID>_<N>, where <PID> is the process id and <N> is the instance id. 🔒

You may optionally create a file named style.css and place it into the tilda config directory if you want to customize the look of tilda. slay. 💅

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💀 BUGS

Please report bugs via Github at https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda/issues — do it, we appreciate you 🫶

🌈 SEE ALSO

For further information visit the project repository or have a look at the wiki: https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda/wiki

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and that's the whole vibe check bestie ✨ this is tilda 2.0.0, dated Jan 2024, from the User Commands manual — go forth and toggle, ily 💖🎀🦋