Guake is a drop-down terminal emulator for GNOME (GTK2). The application is inspired from consoles in computer games, such as Quake, in which the console slides from the top of the screen when a key is pressed. In the same way, Guake can be invoked and hidden using a single key (though Guake can also automatically hide when it loses focus).

Guake Indicator is an Ubuntu AppIndicator for Guake terminal users, useful for those who need to connect to multiple SSH hosts frequently: the indicator lets you easily manage your favorite SSH hosts and establish new SSH connections via Guake.

Guake is a Quake-style drop-down terminal which can be invoked with a single keystroke and hidden by pressing the same key again.

WebUpd8 reader Lu Wang sent us an email about a beautiful (and very popular) color theme for various applications called "Solarized".

Solarized comes with both light and dark colorschemes and what makes it so special is that the contrast is "low in lightness but the colors are still well distinguishable due to the different hue values used" says Lu Wang. But that's of not all. Check out the Solarized homepage for a lot more info and screenshots.

I used to love Yakuake - a drop-down terminal which will remind you of the Quake console - and used it for about an year but then I decided not to install any KDE libraries in Gnome so I switched to Guake. Guake is nice but you can't have multiple terminals in one window and lacks a lot of the customization that was available for Yakuake.

Terminator on the other hand supports multiple terminals in one window, has tabs support, you can save your own custom layouts, has a built-in "watch terminals for activity" option and supports many other customizations but you can't use it as a drop-down terminal, Quake-style. By default that is, because you can actually do this using the Compiz "Widget Layer" plugin.

Here is a video demonstrating how to configure Terminator to use the Widget Layer Compiz plugin and of course, see the actual Terminator using Widget Layer in action (the how-to result is displayed later on in the video, so watch it till the end):

Guake is a Quake like terminal for Gnome. While Yakuake is a lot more customizable and comes with some nice options such as split view (like Terminator), people don't usually like installing KDE applications under GNOME so if you're using GNOME, you're stuck with Guake (or some other alternatives such as Tilda). Further more, I tried the latest Yakuake in GNOME (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx) and it was very laggy (I'm not sure if it's the same in KDE too) so I'll stick with Guake for now.

One thing Guake lacks is customization: you can't adjust the terminal width for instance which is something I was really missing because having a terminal as wide a large monitor is useless. But since it's written in Python, you can adjust Guake's width by editing a file. Here is how.