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.