How to create a hotkey for opening a new iTerm2 window? I typically have multiple terminal sessions across different screens. Since opening the terminal is such a frequent task, I have a hotkey bound to open -b com.googlecode.iterm2 . with Karabiner-Elements. This way I can open a terminal from anywhere with one keypress.

Unfortunately if a terminal window is already open, this hotkey does not create a new window, but creates a new tab in existing windows. The existing window is often some long running "background" process like top or watch, meant to run undisturbed on a secondary screen while I do my work on the main screen. When a new tab is created in it, this causes problems for my workflow:


Hides the monitoring session, which I probably want to see
Opens the new terminal on the secondary screen, even if I had been working on the primary one
Moving the terminal to my main screen also moves the monitoring session to the main screen, so I have to move it back when done
Separating the tab requires finicky and tedious mouse dragging


These may seem like minor complaints, but I develop software and have to go in and out of terminals a lot. Depending on what I'm working on, I may need to open and close new terminals every few minutes, sometimes multiple times a minute. Reusing the same terminal is not really an option because often the terminals have distinct sessions (eg. TUI programs that run continuously, SSH to multiple different machines).

Is there a command I can bind that also creates a new iTerm2 window?

In theory I could command-tab to the terminal first and use a hotkey to make a new window. This has 2 problems:


Instead of one key press, I need to make several key presses to switch windows first.
Doesn't handle edge case where terminal is not running already.
This is already built into iTerm2.  See the Hotkeys section in their documentation.

Show/hide all windows with a dedicated, system-wide hotkey
Create a dedicated hotkey window.

In its simplest form, it's a system-wide terminal window that you can open with a hotkey.



You can find these options in Preferences -&gt; Keys
OSXDaily has an excellent write up on this (with pictures)