In search of a superior terminal: yakuake

I have been content using gnome-terminal for a while now. It’s responsive, featureful, and easy to configure. But there are quite a number of terminal emulators available out there, and I had only tried a handful. So recently I went through several that seem to be well-liked:

• aterm
• eterm
• xterm
• konsole
• mlterm
• guake
• yakuake

All are capable and powerful. But after trying to use and configure each, I decided on yakuake:

I’ll go over some of the main features I appreciated.

Very configurable

The initial configuration of yakuake is attractive, but you can easily change most aspects of its appearance. The idea is that the window slides down from the top or bottom of your screen, just outside your application tray. You can control the width and height of this window, as well as go to fullscreen, by clicking the small down arrow shown in the bottom right of the screenshot above.

Beyond this, by right clicking in the window and selecting Edit Current Profile, you have access to a number of display preferences, from tab naming to background color, font size to default encoding:

You can also create multiple preference profiles, open a filebrowser in your current location, and more from the right click menu.

To configure the keyboard shortcuts, as well as tweak more features of the entire window’s display, look to the bottom of the menu provided by the down arrow in the bottom right. One really useful thing to turn on in the Configure Yakuake menu is Open on sceen at mouse location, in the Window tab. This way, whenever you invoke Yakuake, it will appear under your cursor, meaning you immediately have focus and can start typing!

Fast

Simply interacting with yakuake, it feels more responsive than the other terminals, from the window appearing to command output rendering, etc. I also tried an informal test to get a more quantitative sense of response. I ran the following command in each:

Results (real; average of 5 runs):

• aterm: 5.994s
• eterm: Never finished, just kept running the command. Not sure why…
• mlterm: 3.690s
• xterm: Same issue as eterm…
• guake: 4.573s
• konsole: 2.745s
• yakuake: 3.409s

So not the fastest, but the test wasn’t exactly optimal either.

Powerful keyboard shortcuts

To be honest, I haven’t used too many of the Yakuake level keyboard shortcuts yet, but they seem to be very powerful. One I have enjoyed is the Four Terminals, Grid shortcut. Once mapped, I press Ctrl + Alt + Q to open four separate terminals within a new Yakuake tab:

That makes watching logs, viewing man pages, editing a configuration file, and launching an application at once pretty simple!

More naturally integrated with the desktop

Guake, yakuake, and a few others are self-titled “Quake-style consoles“. Sadly, I never ended up getting to play Quake. I was in RTS-only mode when it was most popular. In any case, the idea of this subgenre is to provide a terminal whose presence is easily toggled.

What this ends up meaning is that once you decide you want to enter something on the command line, you merely need to press whatever key binding you have configured and the terminal is immediately shown. But I have a keybinding to launch [random-terminal-app] already, you say. The difference here is that you aren’t launching a new instance of the terminal, you are just showing one already running. This provides not only the advantage of speed (you save the time to launch the entire application again). It also means you can start commands, leave them running (or just leave their output up), and go back to what you are doing. This is faster than using Alt + Tab to hide the window as long as you have more than two windows open (not unlikely). After you get used to this idea, the command prompt becomes more of a natural extension for the desktop.

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If you regularly use the CLI on a Linux desktop, I encourage you to give all these terminals a try to see what you like best. While it’s only a terminal window, if you need (or want!) to look at it all day, it might as well be as useful and attractive as possible.

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