When comparing TotalTerminal vs Pagehop, the Slant community recommends TotalTerminal for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” TotalTerminal is ranked 20th while Pagehop is ranked 47th. The most important reason people chose TotalTerminal is:
TotalTerminal is a plugin for Terminal.app. It provides persistent Visor Window which slides down when you press a hot-key.
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Pros
Pro Allows quick access to the terminal system-wide
TotalTerminal is a plugin for Terminal.app. It provides persistent Visor Window which slides down when you press a hot-key.
Pro Quake style window show/hide
You maybe know or don't know Quake from Id Software. But this game had the best idea to hide/show a terminal window. Simply using full width but 26 rows. On show the widow slid down from top of screen. On hide it mode up to top edge of the screen until it disappeared. 2nd next best was the semi translucent background. You could still see through the terminal window while it was shown.
The same style is now available in TotalTerminal and iTerm2 (OSX Terminal replacement - no Terminal plugin).
Pro All recipes and tools are open source and you can write your own (JavaScript)
The API is very minimalistic (very easy to learn), and there is complete reference for it.
Pro Web search (horizontal and vertical) and using tools like Regular Expressions on results
Pagehop is bundled-up with recipes for Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo (horizontal) search, and with recipes for Wikipedia, StackOverflow, YouTube, jQuery API documentation, Mozilla Developer Network and others for vertical search.
After making a search you can further filter your results with tools - Regular Expressions, Fuzzy Matching or Search in the urls (instead of titles).
Pro Browsing of online documentation (any static web source)
Navigating through known set of hyperlinks without an actual rendered page, just by writing.
Pro Quickly navigate to web pages and their links
Pro Unlimited, free, fully-functional evaluation
Like the SublimeText editor, Pagehop doesn't lock any features before you purchase a license and only displays (a tiny bit annoying) registration message.
Pro Keyboard shortcut access to Hacker News
To be able to bring up todays news on a key shortcut, is absolutely awesome. Holding shift while pressing enter (choosing) on results, will keep the window open - this way you can open several pages you want to read through with your morning coffee.
Cons
Con No longer under active development
Con Doesn't work on El Capitan with SIP on
Apple introduced a new security feature in OSX El Capitan, called System Integrity Protection, that, among other things, does not allow augmenting Terminal. While it's possible to turn SIP off (instructions on how to turn off SIP and get TotalTerminal working on El Capitan can be found here) it is not recommended.