Tilda - Creating a Drop-Down / Quake (or other FPS) Style Terminal window

This guide will walk you through the installation of a Quake/Half-life style drop-down terminal window, such as the one pictured above.

While I mostly get around in Ubuntu with the GUI, I do try and experience using the Terminal window as much as I can, and having one easily avialable via a hot-key (a single key 'shortcut') can be very convenient. The main reason I have decided to start off with this post, is that I find having the terminal window readily available so that when you are copying and pasting commands from the web, you can have the drop-down terminal window be transparant and 'above' the other windows making it easy to still read whats online while monitoring the installation.

First off, the following installation instructions are for the Gnome Desktop Environment, if you are running KDE, I recommend checking out Yakuake. There are a couple different Quake-style console apps for Gnome, but I prefer to use Tilda, and I will briefly discuss the others at the end.

INSTALLATION

Tilda can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager (Alt+F2 and enter 'synaptic'). Just type 'tilda,' mark it for installation, and apply. To download the program through the terminal, open a window and type:

sudo apt-get install tilda

After the installation has completed, it can be accessed under Applications > Accessories > Tilda

By default, the hot-key is (duh) the Tilda button. "The what!?" The tilda. That wavy line that you've never known actually had a name, on the same button the crazy-lookin apostraphe, below the Esc key. To change this (I like to use the tilda button to switch application windows - look for an upcoming how-to post on that!) simply right-click anywhere on the Tilda terminal window and select preferences. A menu will pop up with several tabs.

The 'Keybinding' tab, is where you will change what button to press in order to hide/view the window. You can also adjust other options such as the size of the window, add borders, add background image, change colors, etc.

INITIATE TILDA ON START-UP

You may be wondering at this point just how annoying its gonna be to have to wait for your machine to start-up, then select Tilda from the application menu everytime, or if theres a way for it to initiate on startup. Well, there is. And its easy.

Just go to System > Preferences > Sessions and enter the information as seen below. The command is simply 'tilda' (without quotes), the title is Tilda, and you can put whatever comment you damn well please.

And there you have it, folks. Feel free to mess around with some of the settings, as you can see from the screenshots, I prefer a classic matrix-esque color scheme and to have the terminal window only take up a portion of my screen.

Also, if Tilda isn't quite what you are looking for, or doesn't agree with your system for whatever reason, don't fret, you can also look into YeahConsole (the simplest drop-down console) or Guake. Both can be found in the repositories.