If your like me you probably dont like waiting for the terminal window to load and you would rather have fast access to the shell.

Remember the Quake console ? Hmm or maybe your still playing ? Pressing “~” would drop down a console where you could enter Quake commands.

Well it is possible to have this type of drop down terminal on your Ubuntu desktop!

On Ubuntu with the default Gnome desktop the native utility for this is called Tilda. The latest Tilda release is 0.9.4 (November 2006), its a few years old but works very well.

You can easily install a Tilda package from the repositories with Synaptic. Launch Synaptic and search for “tilda”.

The first time you run Tilda launch it from Applications -> Accessories it will then open the preferences window. The first thing you want to do is assign a key binding as it is set to F0 by default. I chose “F12” or you can change it to any other key you wish

You can also customize more options to your liking like the width & length and enable the scrollbar. I also enabled transparency, looks great!

Once your options are all set click “close” and the tilda terminal window will open, then just toggle the key you assigned!

* Note to Kubuntu users, you can probalby run this application but i would recommend trying Yakuake as it is native to KDE. (http://yakuake.kde.org/).

Happy Tilding!