I have become a big fan of drop down terminal windows, modeled after the Quake console, instead of having a terminal window sitting in the background that I have to switch to for every command that I want to run. You just press a keyboard shortcut, run your command, and hide the window again.

The linux terminal can get boring at times owing to lack of colors & a rigid black background. Hardcore Linux enthusiasts won’t think about the appearance of the terminal but normal users will surely get bored of the monochrome terminal sooner or later. Surprisingly beautifying the terminal is pretty simple.

Keep a terminal application open all the time? A drop-down terminal such as Guake might suit you better. A drop-down, or Quake-style, terminal stays hidden until you call it up with a key combination.

Use Terminator: Terminator is a nice way to free your valuable screen space from multiple terminal windows. Instead of using one terminal window for each task, divide an existing window horizontally or vertically each time you need a new terminal window.

Guake - Quake-style terminal for GNOME
A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

In a sense, the desktop is the best thing that ever happened to the command line. Because a virtual terminal runs in a graphical environment, it boasts all sorts of enhancements that the unadorned shell lacks -- everything from multiple tabs to easy selection of display fonts and background and foreground colors.

A lot of people believe that you have to know how to use the terminal in order to use Linux. Other people claim you never have to touch the terminal at all. In reality, the neither group is quite right.

We know all about how powerful the GNU/Linux terminal is. However, it’s a pain to have to fire up a terminal emulator like Konsole or gnome-terminal, wait for a few seconds for it load, and then have to keep Alt-Tabbing to it.

I work a lot at the console level, I even lauch some programs directly from there, and I know there are a lot of users like me.

Somtimes I also open two or even three terminals to monitor differente processes on the same machine or even on different PCs using ssh connection.