If you’re a Linux user like me, there’s a good chance that you like to drop into the terminal for a lot of stuff; I just find it easier to open a terminal and type ‘cp /tmp/file ~’ than open up my graphical file manager and copy the file that way. The problem with this setup is that you wind up with about 20 terminals after a while; although they don’t take up much resources, it can be annoying when you’re alt-tabbing through windows and you have to skip through all those terminals. While there are solutions that make multiple terminals fit in the space of one (such as tabbed terminals or using screen to have multiple terminals in one), another solution avoids the problem entirely by having a single keyboard shortcut open and close a terminal; if you’ve ever played a first-person shooter game on a PC with a console, you’ll know the sort. And even though, strictly speaking, it’s a KDE app, it works fine on GNOME.

Step 1 is obviously installing it; you can find it here on kde-apps.org, although it’s also in the Ubuntu repositories. Once you’ve installed it, you should probably configure it to automatically start up on boot; under Ubuntu, you can go to the Preferences sub-menu of the System menu and open ‘Startup Applications’, or ‘Sessions’ on older versions, and add a new entry. Or you can manually start it by running it from a terminal; it’s your call. Activating and deactivating it is by default bound to F12, but you can change this from within via the customization settings; more on that below. You can create multiple subwindows via the plus sign in the bottom-left, and close any window by pressing Ctrl-Shift-W in that window or right-clicking on its name and selecting Close Active Terminal.

You might want to change yakuake’s default shortcut key, or add/remove the background transparency, or change the theme. All of these can be done by clicking the downward-pointing arrow in the bottom-right corner of the yakuake window. Manage Profiles is for changing the appearance of the terminal itself (such as transparency, which is under Appearance; you have to edit a color scheme to set its transparency); Configure Shortcuts obviously allows you to change keyboard shortcuts, and Configure Yakuake lets you configure things like the opening/closing animation, where it shows up on your screens, default width, etc.