YaKuake - An easy access console for KDE (NewsForge)

[Posted March 17, 2006 by ris]

NewsForge takes a look at YaKuake. "YaKuake is a pretty simple tool. The first time you run YaKuake during a KDE session, it pops up a small dialog saying "Application Successfully started! Press Alt+` to use it..." and then it disappears into the background. If you use Konsole, YaKuake can take its settings -- background, font, schema, history, line spacing, transparency, and so forth -- from Konsole, or not, as you prefer. Like Konsole, YaKuake features tabs, so it's possible to have multiple consoles running in a single instance of YaKuake."

You should try it.

Posted Mar 17, 2006 22:21 UTC (Fri) by ctpm (guest, #35884) [Link] (2 responses)

I confess I was a bit skeptical, but I gave it a try.
I'm beginning to like yakuake a lot!

Who said games (and movies! :-) couldn't teach us something about
interfaces? Also some other good ideas seem to have been put in practice
as of late, like this ZUI (also came on slashdot):

http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=18

(if you read Jeff Raskin's book you already know this type of interface)

ctpm

You should try it.

Posted Mar 21, 2006 1:13 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

If you like the idea, do some minimal tweaking to your desktop/window-manager and your favourite terminal emulator. I'm sure you can get basically the same results.

For instance, I use IceWM. IceWM has, by default, a keyboard shortcut for a new terminal. Getting to an existing one is normally only a matter of alt-tabs. I figure that with fvwm I could even program the exact functionality of YaKuake in the fvwmrc.

Having an application deciding on a global shortcut can be a pain: I'd rather leave those settings at a global level, if possible. And as the issue here is really windows switching, it is best left to the window manager.

You should try it.

Posted Mar 21, 2006 5:17 UTC (Tue) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]

> I'm sure you can get basically the same results.

Indeed you could acchieve similar behavior for KDE kwin and KDE Konsole within a shell script, thanks to DCOP and KHotKeys. Not everybody wants to bother, however. And the effect of the smooth animation is not to be underestimated from a not-entirely-conscious POV: People generally like a visual cue of where things come from and end up (imagine Apple Exposé without the animation).