YaKuake stands for Yet Another Kuake KDE terminal emulator. The website is pretty lame (doesn’t look like it’s been updated in 3 years), but the application itself is pretty handy. YaKuake can be hidden and recalled by a user-defined hotkey. Users can specify how large they want the window to be, where they want it, and on what screen it should show up. YaKuake can also be pinned to the desktop so it can’t be hidden. YaKuake is layered over all windows and displays as “always on top”.

I set up my access key to be F12, so when I tap that key, a terminal drops down from the top of my screen. It’s just a standard terminal at this point, and also supports tabs. When I’m finished, I tap F12 again and YaKuake hides itself. The access key can be set to whatever the user wants, within reason (ie you can’t use “2″ as your access key).

YaKuake can be downloaded from the apt-get repo (apt-get install yakuake) or downloaded as source from Softpedia.