When comparing Default Folder X vs TotalTerminal, 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 Default Folder X is ranked 39th. 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 Directory assistant Finder Integration
From the Open / Save file dialog, you can access your recent, favorite, and open folders. Includes a menubar item and can add to the Finder toolbar for quick access.
Pro New features are intuitive
Many of the features provided by Default Folder are quite intuitive and quickly become very useful. When a save dialogue is open, just click on an open Finder window to change the current path to that directory. Integrated Quicklook previews make selecting files in the list view much easier, and Spotlight tags can be added directly from the save dialogue.
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).
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.