Monday 29 June 2009

Yakuake - Great Quake-Like Terminal Application for KDE4

A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt. In this article I will talk about Yakuake, a powerful terminal application for Linux, and also the KDE counterpart of Tilda in GNOME.

Yakuake running in Kubuntu 9.04

Yakuake is a Quake-like terminal, which means it behaves just like any console in Quake or usual first-person shooter games. It supports global keybindings and can be invoked with F12 and hided with the same keyboard shortcut when you finished your job with it. This way it will run in background but it won't eat your taskbar or system tray space.


Among the features Yakuake ships with are:
- global keybindings (F12 shows/hides the console)
- the ability to inherit Konsole's settings
- transparency effects, it also supports backgrounds
- it supports profiles
- configurable size and animation


Yakuake currently has an updated page on kde-apps.org, but the other homepage doesn't seem to be maintained at the moment (here). Just use the kde-apps.org page for now. In Kubuntu, you can use sudo apt-get install yakuake to get version 2.9.4.

Yakuake is a powerful and pretty popular terminal application for KDE, and maybe the perfect alternative to Konsole. It doesn't stay in the way of the user and it can inherit the settings of Konsole too.

5 comments:

Eike Hein said...

Hi,

thanks for the nice review! However, could you please remove the link to the old uv.ro website? It was created by the previous maintainer of Yakuake, who has been inactive for a number of years. It's confusing for users when it shows up as one of the first results for "yakuake" on Google, but I have no control over it and can't take it down, so I'm trying to get people to stop linking to it ;).

Cheers,
Eike, Yakuake maintainer/developer

Craciun Dan said...

Yeah, sure thanks for clearing that out for me.

Eike Hein said...

I still plan to put up a nice new website with a tips section and such on http://yakuake.kde.org/, but you know how it is, time is limited and coding always seems more important somehow ;).

Thanks for the link removal :).

Craciun Dan said...

You're welcomed :)

I really hope the new website will be ready soon.

Eothred said...

I love yakuake! Don't understand why it isn't the default terminal for e.g. kubuntu. It is extremely convenient to save all that precious screen space! Keep up the good work Eike:)