YeahConsole: a dropdown Linux terminal that’s better than Tilda
I’ve been a big fan of Tilda, the dropdown terminal window for Linux, for a long while; pressing F2 to grab a terminal is hardwired into my fingers now, and I’m crippled without it. However, Tilda’s been getting steadily shitter as time’s gone on; more crashy, more unresponsive. Recently, it stopped taking keyboard focus when you brought it up, which has led more than once to me pressing F2 and then typing half the shell command I wanted into my (still focused) Firefox window. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but at some point I’m going to type my password into an IRC channel. It’s gotta stop.
The obvious replacement is yakuake, the KDE dropdown terminal. However, I hate it. I don’t even know why, to be honest; it just feels weird to me in a way that Tilda doesn’t. So I looked around for alternatives, and found two: Guake, which is supposedly a better Tilda and Yakuake for the Gnome desktop, and yeahconsole. Sadly for the Guake team, I found yeahconsole first, so that’s what I’m using. Actually, I rather like the out-and-out simplicity and bare-bones nature of yeahconsole, which is why I’m sticking with it; when I need to do shell things, I don’t want flashy features, I want a shell. I don’t use tabbed terminal windows, for example. Just simplicity, that’s what I want.
Yeahconsole is available in the Ubuntu repositories (click to install on Ubuntu). Here’s how I set it up.
First, it needs to run every time I log in. So, go to System > Preferences > Session, select Startup Programs, click Add, and add a new command, name “YeahConsole”, command “yeahconsole”.
Next, it looks a bit rubbish when you start it up. Here’s how bare-bones yeahconsole is: you configure it with X resources. Party like it’s 1989! I had to go look up how to do this; for the more tender in years among us, X resources were a sort of central configuration for all your apps, round about the same time that humanity was fighting off sabre-toothed tigers and wondering whether that hot flamey thing in the corner could actually be useful. On Ubuntu, you need to edit (actually, you probably need to create) a file called .Xresources in your home folder*. In that file, you put the configuration for yeahconsole, like this:
yeahconsole*toggleKey: None+F2
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: 20
yeahconsole*aniDelay: 0
yeahconsole*stepSize: 10
yeahconsole*faceName: ProFontWindows:style=Regular
yeahconsole*faceSize: 9The toggleKey one is the important one: it sets which key you use to summon the terminal. I like F2, myself, but pick whatever. What all this stuff means is documented in the man page (man yeahconsole), apart from which font to use. This is the faceName and faceSize options above, and here you have to delve a bit (I told you this was old-fashioned; I started writing a yeahconsole-properties configuration utility that did all this for you, but couldn’t be bothered). In a terminal, run fc-list. This lists all the TrueType fonts that you can use in an xterm. Choose one, and put it in faceName above.
Now, simply start yeahconsole for the first time (press Alt+F2, type yeahconsole), and then press F2 (or your key of choice). Pow, a dropdown terminal, like Tilda, but one that won’t keep crashing and make you cry.
One other thing: if you hit Ctrl-D to log out by mistake, it’ll close yeahconsole (tilda did this too), and that’s really irritating. To fix this, put the following in a file called bashloop in your home folder:
#!/bin/bash
while true; do bash; doneand change your Startup Programs command above to be yeahconsole -e /home/username/bashloop. Now Ctrl-D won’t close yeahconsole. Win.
Maybe you could like Guake, i’ve started this project kinda 1 year ago, aiming on creating something more “gnomic” than tilda.
http://guake-terminal.org/
Next release, the 0.3 includes lots of features, including a big change on UI (tabs replaced by toogle button bar), to improve the Gnome HIG compliance.
See you!
2 hours later
I’ve used xterm wired to F1 key for years. Fast and handy, but often leaves me with tens of open xterm windows. Will definitely try out this stuff!
8 hours later
“However, I hate it. I don’t even know why, to be honest”
Ah, the elusive source of completely pointless cross desktop duplication. Good times. Someone from psych should investigate this feeling to see if we can kill it. Apparently it is so strong that it drove you to even tolerate editing a bunch of xresources and come up with hacks to run something else.
17 hours later
*sigh*
Reasons I don’t like yakuake:
1. I can’t work out how to make it be the width of the screen. There doesn’t seem to be a setting for that.
2. I can’t work out how to turn off the “title” bar at the bottom of the window
3. Aha, I have worked out how to configure the width. There seem to be two entirely separate settings areas: one that you get from right-clicking on the console window and going to Settings, and another which you get from clicking a little down-arrow icon on the “title” bar. (If you’re about to say: one of them configures “konsole” and one configures yakuake itself, well, I don’t care about that; why not combine them?)
4. Oh, I was wrong, there’s another settings thing from down-arrow-icon, Configure Yakuake, which allows me to set the height as well.
It does what I want it to. It just doesn’t feel right. If you want to take that as evidence that I hate KDE, then I can’t stop you.
17 hours later
Yakuake is great - thanks for making me aware of it!
I found it fairly easy to start using it - as a now-ex konsole user, I could just click ‘use konsole settings’ and it imported all my colour/font settings etc. Setting the width and height was straightforward enough, but it’s pretty bad usability-wise that it has two menus, accessible via different means…
My only (minor) complaint is that the button to open a new tab isn’t quite big enough for my liking.
19 hours later
Ha! That “click to install on Ubuntu” thing is so cool! I’ve never seen that before. That, together with the rest of your instructions, made me try it out. Thanks! :)
22 hours later
There is also
yeahconsole*restart:1
which will auto restart it. even better would probably be if it hid itself on restart…
23 hours later
1 and 4 Yes you can set height/width
2. No way to disable the bar as far as I know. There does need to be some place to put the settings buttons after all. Unless you want to configure the thing from a text file…
3. Why not combine them? I suppose at the time it was just easier to leave them separate, since all the konsole settings are from the konsole part and really have nothing to do with yakuake.
This has improved somewhat with the current version(2.9.2) though. Right clicking on the console will give you the option of setting the profile for the terminal, instead of being called settings. And no more of this save as default BS as in the old ones. Could still be better if it was integrated into the main settings area though.
2 days later
I have organized the configuration in a different file called .Xyeahconsole instead of .Xresources
cause it has a lot of stuff and it’s convenient to keep it apart. 8)
Take a look (and leave comments please) …
http://www.gnulinuxargentina.com.ar/foro/viewtopic.php?t=86
if you don’t understand a word, i can translate it 4 u ;)
Thanks, nice people!
4 days later
Aqtually,
I found that the site with YeahWM - of which Yeahconsole is a part - is interesting.
=> http://phrat.de/
It seems to be an interesting WM - and yes, I am probably minimalist, when it comes to that.
6 days later
Thanks for putting me onto Yaquake, very useful.
I’m a KDE user of course…
7 days later
How can you hate Yakuake? Its a part of my life as much as is my web browser, my music player and my feed reader. It intergrates awesomely with my work environment.
4 weeks later
New laptop. Now using yakuake, which has so far been annoying in that it doesn’t always want to allow me to copy from it; if I select text in yakuake and then middle-click to paste into Firefox, it doesn’t work. If I right-click Copy the text in yakuake and then ctrl-V paste into Firefox, it doesn’t work. I thought we’d sorted out all this clipboard shit years ago?
5 weeks later