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.

Quake is a first person shooter game and design inspiration for Guake Terminal Emulator came from consoles in computer games such as Quake which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again. Guake is originally inspired from KDE's Yakuake.

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.

If you're wondering whether Guake and Yakuake are Polynesian happy mushrooms, you're a bit off mark. These are Linux command line terminals, modified to behave like the console in the popular First Person Shooter (FPS) Quake. Hence, the funny names.

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.

There are plenty of different terminal programs out there for all different desktops. YaKuake is one such KDE-based terminal emulator with a difference.

If you are addicted to doing things on terminal, yakuake is your friend. Yakuake is a KDE application and it takes the standard KDE Konsole and changes it to a drop-down, on-demand terminal over your desktop and applications. This is a very handy little application

Most people tend to think of the terminal as boring. But here I will list a number of choices you can pick to pimp it out a bit. The following applications can increase the usability and the speed in which you use a terminal, from drop down screens, syntax highlighting, or having multiple terminals in one window.

Here is a sample code for using VTE Terminal Emulating widget. Vte terminal widget of GTK can be used to embed a terminal in your GTK program. Vte widget is used in many projects like the Synaptic package manager to shown package installation's terminal output.Also, much of GNOME Terminal's functionality is provided by the VTE widget. Here is how you can start using the widget