Scratchpad is one of the coolest, and unique features in i3. Scratchpad is basically a hidden workspace that you can send your programs into it.
There is no way to open that workspace. Instead, when using
scratchpad show, the window will be shown again, as a floating window, centered on your current workspace
Using scratchpad, we can turn any terminal into a drop-down terminal. I'm using terminator which supports tiling (and more)
and F1 key as hot key to toggle terminator since I have no other use for formally
known help button key on linux.
# Add this to your i3 config (~/.config/i3/config) and restart i3 (Super+Shift+R)
exec --no-startup-id "terminator -m"
for_window [class="Terminator" title="^((?!Terminator Preferences).)*$"] move scratchpad, move position 0 0, resize set 1366 768;
bindsym F1 [class="Terminator"] scratchpad show;
You can also view the changes via Github Gist.
Update: It's possible to send other programs into scratchpad workspace, and
toggle them using different key bindings. The trick is to exclude Terminator
which is also in Scratchpad from showing. for example, Using the code below we
can simply send any active programs into Scratchpad using Super+Shift+F1 key
and retrieve them one by one by hitting Super+F1 and only by pressing F1 we
can toggle Terminator:
bindsym $mod+Shift+F1 move container to scratchpad
bindsym $mod+F1 [class="^((?!Terminator).)*$"] scratchpad show