I’m going to start a series of blog posts about linux apps that I can’t live without. After a fresh system install these are the first installed.
The more and more I use Linux the more I find myself stuck into some console. While the default terminal app shipped with Gnome is just fine for small jobs it gets annoying when I accidentally close it and or when it’s not on the right desktop. Alt-tab-ing all the time is painful.
This is where the geek in me comes in. Remember the times of Quake and the “console”, when you pressed the ’tilda’ key (~) and a nice console dropped down from the top of the screen allowing you to type game commands ? Well that nifty little concept made its way to the modern desktop!
Enter Yakuake or “A drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology” as the About menu says. I install it even if I use gnome and although it ads some tens of megs of libraries and breaks the “pure gnome install”. It’s so damn worth it! Pressing a magic key (default F12) instantly pops out the Yakuake window. Do your thing in the console and press the magic key again and the console disappears making way for your other apps. It’s simply brilliant. Yakuake has support for multiple terminal tabs so you can have multiple sessions opened. Using short cut keys you can quickly change the tabs. I consider that Yakuake improves my productivity just as much as the ‘screen’ utility, even tough it has nothing to do with ‘screen’ 
Yakuake is not the only app that offers this type of functionality. Tilda is another ‘quake console clone’ and it’s based on GTK instead of QT.
Another alternative is ‘guake’, a younger app that aims at the same goal: quake style terminal emulator. It is also GTK based , hence the ‘g’, and it feels more snappy than tilda. With a bit of customizing it comes close to yakuake but I find it a bit unpolished.
Personally I find Yakuake faster and more friendly but it’s all about habits. Give them all a chance!
If you are using a Mac and want the same thing take a look at Visor ( Quake3 anyone? ). It is roughly the same thing.
The same thing goes for you Windoes Powershell lovers out there. You can have the amazing Powershell in a quake console: http://poshconsole.codeplex.com/
Nice pic goes here.
Thanks for the guake hint. Tilda was not what I desired and I didn’t want to install KDE libs
Did you try it ? I’m struggling with it for the last 2 weeks and it’s almost usable.
I use it since then. It’s very handy when you want to ping something, to search something in the man page or to hoogle something