Brief: Quickly access your terminal that is customizable and powerful for a variety of users with Guake Terminal emulator.

Guake Terminal: Top-Down Terminal for GNOME Desktop

Guake terminal

Guake is a terminal emulator that’s tailored for GNOME desktop with a top-down design.

It was originally inspired from the terminal seen in an FPS game (Quake). Even though it was initially built as a quick and accessible terminal, it is much more than that.

Guake terminal offers a ton of features, and customizable options. Here, I’ll highlight the key features of the terminal along with the process of getting it installed on any of your Linux distribution.

Features of Guake Terminal

guake terminal
  • Keyboard Shortcut (F12) to launch the terminal anywhere as an overlay
  • Guake terminal runs in the background for persistent access
  • Ability to split tabs horizontally and vertically
  • Change the default shell from available options (if any)
  • Re-alignment option
  • Change appearance of the terminal from a wide selection of color palettes
  • Ability to save the content of the terminal to a file using GUI option
  • Toggle Full screen option when needed
  • You can easily save the tabs or open new tabs when needed
  • Ability to restore tabs
  • Option to configure and learn new keyboard shortcuts to quickly access the terminal and perform tasks
  • Change colors of specific tabs
  • Easily rename the tabs to quickly access what you already need
  • Quick open feature to open text files directly from your terminal on your favorite editor with a click
  • Ability to add your own command or scripts when starting up or showing up the Guake terminal
  • Multi-monitor support
guake preferences

Just to have fun, you can do a great deal of things. But, I also believe that power users can make use of the features to make their terminal experience easier and more productive.

For the time I used it to test out a few things and write this article, I felt like I was summoning the terminal to be honest. So, I definitely find it cool!

Installing Guake Terminal on Linux

guake terminal 2

Guake Terminal is available through the default repositories on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch.

You can follow its official instructions to know the commands you can use or if you’re using an Ubuntu-based distro, simply type in:

sudo apt install guake

Do note that you may not get the latest version using this method. So, if you want to have the latest version, you can opt to use the PPA by Linux Uprising to get the latest version:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/guake
sudo apt update
sudo apt install guake

In either case, you can also get it using Pypi or from source by referring to the official documentation or the GitHub page.

Guake Terminal

What do you think about Guake Terminal? Do you think of it as a useful terminal emulator? Anything similar that you know of?

Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments down below.