How To: Get quick, stylish access to the terminal in linux

r3dux | February 6, 2009

If you’ve ever played Quake or its derivatives, you’ll know that you could hit tilda ( i.e. ` ) to bring up a console where you could fanny about w/ stacks of game settings (sv_gravity 200 springs to mind )

Well, you can do the same for a bash/shell terminal in linux with these handy progs:

Yakuake – Made for KDE, works well, except on my 8.10 (upgraded, not clean install) which sometimes doesn’t display the last line of text or update properly (on Nvidia 177 drivers).

Tilda – Made for KDE & Gnome (I believe) – mostly works well, unless it frackn seg-faults on startup at which point you have to delete the ~/.tilda folder to unfrack it.

Guake – Made for Gnome, works great, and my personal *uake of choice (pictured below).

To install any of these, just do the standard sude apt-get install yakuake/tilda/guake and see which one you like best. All have transparancy, tabs and a bunch of customisable features so there’s bound to be one you’re happy with and/or doesn’t spaz out – and once you’ve banged them into your Gnome Sessions or KDE Autostart a handy console will only ever be one fat-fingered key-stab away.

Marvelous.