Do you open the terminal a lot on your Linux desktop? There's a terminal you can open faster than a standard emulator window, and it might feel familiar to you if you've ever played the game Quake .
In the past, I'd rely on one keyboard shortcut for opening Konsole on my KDE Plasma desktop: Ctrl+Alt+T. That seemed fast enough, but I'd still need to use Ctrl+Shift+Q to close it, or keep it open and cycle through windows with Alt+Tab to find it every time I needed it. Turns that's not the fastest way to drop in and out of the command line; you can remove even more friction by installing one app.
Introducing Yakuake: Fast terminal action
Yakuake is a dropdown terminal, meaning it hides out of view until you call it to "drop down" so you can interact with it. It's designed to work best in the KDE Plasma desktop environment, where the window lives just outside your desktop. At the touch of button—F12 by default—it drops down over your application windows and stays there until you dismiss it. It takes its name from the Quake video game franchise , which famously implemented an in-game console you could use to adjust settings and enter cheat codes.
If you prefer, Yakuake can also fall up from below your screen, or slide from the side, instead of dropping downward. You can adjust the size too, if you think it takes up too much or too little space. How it works is up to you, but I'll get into those tweaks later.
When it's open, you can run commands in Yakuake and otherwise use it like you would any other terminal emulator. It'll stay in front of your other applications until you dismiss it by hitting F12 again. Your terminal session stays active in the background, and you can always pick up where you left off the next time you hit F12.
Like Konsole, Yakuake also gives you tabs for running multiple sessions at once. Create a new one with Ctrl+Shift+T, then use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Keys to cycle through them. All of them are maintained until you shut down your computer or explicitly close Yakuake.
Installing Yakuake
If it sounds like something you want to try, you can install Yakuake easily on just about any Linux distribution. It's available across repositories, so either search for it in your software manager or use one of these commands to install it in your terminal:
You can also find Yakuake on FlatHub if you prefer to install it as a Flatpak. This is a good option if you want to make sure you have the latest version on distributions like Ubuntu LTS that keep packages several versions behind.
The first time you run Yakuake after installation, you'll be prompted to confirm or change the shortcut to open Yakuake. By default, Yakuake uses F12. If you aren't sure what will fit your workflow best, you can always change it later.
My favorite tweaks to make
If you open the settings menu for Yakuake, you'll see several options for adjusting the way Yakuake looks and behaves.
You can quickly open Yakuake's configuration menu by hitting Ctrl+Shift+, (comma) while Yakuake is open.
First, I don't like Yakuake taking up a ton of room on my screen, I prefer to have a more compact experience, and a drop-down that happens a little more out of the way. To do that, in the Window tab I adjust the width to 50%. I also prefer to move it to the left, setting it at one notch from the leftmost end of the scale.
I also prefer the animation to happen very fast. Forgive my impatience, but I don't care enough about pretty effects to wait a whole 170ms for access to my command line. I reduce that to just 50ms.
After making those changes, I hide the title bar (in the Window tab of the configuration menu). There isn't much use for it once Yakuake is configured how you want it. Even then, you can always un-hide the title bar by hitting Ctrl+Shift+M.
Another suggestion I have is creating a new profile in Konsole and giving it a transparent background. That'll let you work in Yakuake while still being able to see the windows behind it.
Changing the activation hotkey
If you want a more genuine Quake experience, you can set the keyboard shortcut for Yakuake to the`key (sometimes notated as tilde,~). To do that, you'll need to hit Ctrl+Alt+, (comma) and scroll until you see "Open/Retract Yakuake." Look for the "Global" column and click it to edit the shortcut.
Of course, relying on the`key will get annoying if you ever need to type with it, so I don't recommend that route. A compromise might be a more Jedi Knight feeling with Shift+` if you don't mind using two keys instead of just one.
Don't use KDE Plasma? Try Guake
One of the reasons I like Yakuake so much is its integration into one of my favorite desktop environments, KDE Plasma. If you're not using Plasma, you may need to install extra KDE libraries to make Yakuake work.
So what if you're instead a GNOME fan and wondering how you're supposed to get any value out of this? In that case, I recommend you look into the Guake Terminal instead. It's designed to work with the GNOME ecosystem (and I'd specualte it'll work better than Yakuake in other DEs as well). You may also want to look into GNOME extensions that improve your Ubuntu experience .
