Today we look at Yakuake, the drop down terminal emulator for KDE. This application is part of The KDE Extragear collection, hosted on KDE-Apps.org. You can also download it from KDE.org's Yakuake mirror page.

Installation

Although Yakuake's tarball contains install instructions, the extract command specified in the documentation won't extract XZ compressed tarballs, so use the following commands to extract and install.

# tar xJf yakuake-2.9.9.tar.xz

# cd yakuake-2.9.9

# mkdir build

# cd build

# cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../

Stephen Glasskeys

When cmake finishes, run make and make install.

# make

# make install

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After all the dust settles, you should be able to test Yakuake and run it from the command line, like so:

# yakuake&

Welcome to Yakuake

The first time Yakuake runs, it asks if you wish to assign F12 as a keyboard shortcut. This means every time F12 is pressed, Yakuake will drop down from the top of the screen, and present you a handy terminal window. Pressing F12 again tucks Yakuake out of the way.

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Finally, if you decide later that you need to change Yakuake's assigned hotkey, right-click KDE's launch button, and open Edit Applications to modify these settings.

Stephen Glasskeys

This story, "Yakuake -- the drop-down terminal for KDE" was originally published by ITworld .