guake VS insect

Discovering the drop down console was a revelation.

An homage: http://guake-project.org/

One of the very first things I do is to install Guake terminal. I usually change its hotkey to ctrl-alt-T, because I'm so used to using that for the terminal.

Maybe Guake will be to your liking?

I did discover one irrelevant cool thing though, well worth your time playing with: GUAKE --> http://guake-project.org

Guake does it, too (on Linux).

I'm not sure which desktop or window manager you use, but you could try using a drop-down terminal like Guake and running pulsemixer on a tab in it.

Apparently this replaces https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

You might like https://insect.sh/ ;)

For the record I use insect.

https://github.com/sharkdp/insect seems to be somewhat similar, but it's mostly for physical units. However, it's the only opensource one that is embeddable.

Insect: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

It is a bit slow but has decent features, including some physical units support.

I set up Tilda (or another Guake equivalent; I tried a bunch of them and can’t remember on which I settled in the end) to run it automatically when a terminal is opened, when pressing Scroll Lock. It’s quite neat: when I need to do a quick calculation, I just hit Scroll Lock, which spawns a drop down terminal with the focus; then type whatever I want to calculate; then control-D to dismiss the drop down terminal and I am back in whatever I was doing without moving either hand off the keyboard.

I do more or less the same thing on my Mac with Alfred.

I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:

Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)

Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/

Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)

Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)

Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)

insect.sh goes up to about 109 × 1015.