Yakuake - terminal in a Quake-style

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When you use console in X-Window, often and often you desktop are literally wasted with xterms. It is more important, that you productivity is lowered, too. But here is solution - Yakuake.


Gamer`s console
When I was young, I spent pretty much time with CounterStrike and QuakeIII. And I felled in love with this small and elegant console hidden-in-a-top of screen in Quake. Till now, I was missing this feature on my desktop. But surfing in Synaptic recently, I found what I missed so much - Yakuake - and installed it immediately.


Tweaking is necessary
The main thing after installing Yakuake is tweaking. For comfort and productive work, you should customise Yakuake to yourself: keyboard shortcuts, theme, console hide duration and so on.

First step is to define for yourself with size of console: if it`s too small, you can`t see all that is written in console, and if it`s too large, it can overlap all of applications. I think that vertical size of 40% is fine for me - I can see everything in console and it don`t occludes other applications.

You can customize not only height of Yakuake console, but position on screen as well. It can be positioned in left, right on in centre. Of course, you can set position in procents precisely.

But the main thing in Yakuake are hotkeys. The work in console itself disposes to hotkeys and keyboard use, and properly configured hotkeys combinations can increase you productivity with Yakuake dramatically. There are not so much keys to customise, so tweaking don`t take so much time. By default you can call Yakuake by pressing F12 functional key, but you can redefine it to you choice.

Because Yakuake is very dynamic thing, only video can show it real capabilities, so I made short youtube film and here it is:




A little comment: first of all, film shows conventional work in terminal with xterms in X-Window, and they overlap each other. Then Yakuake is ran, and do the same stuff much more effective.

Links:
More about Yakuake can be readed here, there and here.