Thursday, January 17th, 2008
YeahConsole a lighter yakuake alternative for xubuntu linux
This week, I’d like to talk about YeahConsole, an alternative to yakuake, or a more “native yakuake” for xubuntu and ubuntu. You could also look at it as a lighter terminal emulator wrapper for those who do not really like installing extra kde packages just to use yakuake.
“WHOA! What is a terminal emulator wrapper?”
For those unfamiliar with terminal emulator wrappers, they’re a lot of fun the wrapper itself tries to emulate how a console window works in FPS games like Quake, CS (Counter Strike) and the like, where you press the Tilda key and a console screen slides down over the game screen. Terminal Emulator Wrappers such as YeahConsole bring this functionality to Linux.
In a nutshell, the terminal emulator wrapper is a frame which slides the terminal up and down from the top of your screen when you press your activation key (I’ve set mine to F12).
Installation
As with any application in the ubuntu repository, it’s as easy as: sudo aptitude install yeahconsole.
If you find that you do not have YeahConsole in your repo, you can get it from this site: http://phrat.de/yeahtools.html
After this is done, if you wish, you can tinker with the configuration for the yeahconsole game terminal emulator.
YeahConsole configuration
Below is the relevant part of my /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-common file.
yeahconsole*term: mrxvt
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: 20
yeahconsole*toggleKey: None+F12
yeahconsole*keyFull: None+F11
yeahconsole*aniDelay: 1
yeahconsole*stepSize: 20
The above is a listing of resources prefixed with “yeahconsole*”.
yeahconsole*term: YeahConsole by default launches with xterm, but if you are like me and like to use other X terminal emulators, the first resource that you need to set up is “term” which is short for “terminal” I use “mrxvt”, a very nice terminal emulator which supports tabbing.
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: As with any other linux app, you’ll find that YeahConsole provides you with stacks of options - you can set the height of the sliding console if you require it (defaults to 10).
yeahconsole*toggleKey: Previous to YeahConsole, I was using yakuake, which had F12 as the default sliding down key. I wanted to replicate this with YeahConsole and so I’ve set the toggleKey configuration resource to None+F12 meaning I only want to press the F12 key alone and no additional keys (defaults to CTRL+ALT+y).
yeahconsole*keyFull: YeahConsole supports fullscreen display. Similar to yeahconsole*toggleKey, this resource allows you to set the key for fullscreen (defaults to ALT+F11).
yeahconsole*aniDelay: I don’t know if this is measured in milliseconds or what have you, but this resource sets up the animation delay for the slide (defaults to 40).
More information on YeahConsole’s resources can be seen by issuing the man command (man yeahconsole).
Shortcomings
YeahConsole’s shortcomings include lack of support for terminal emulators that feature context menus like konsole for yakuake and its interface is not as well integrated with the OS as yakuake is. However, overall, I think it’s pretty solid. A very nice little program and a great, lightweight alternative to yakuake. Definitely give it a try.
on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 am:
And what about aterm?
Why it isn’t work?
on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 9:06 am:
Hi Mistral, I don’t think aterm can be embedded, so this pretty much counts it as not compatible with yeahconsole or any other terminal emulation wrappers.
on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 12:19 am:
Hi,
it is nice, but Alt+. seems not to work, is it possible to fix that?
on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:05 am:
Wierd that - I’m surfing looking for a bugfix for yakuake and I copme accross this telling me to switch to yeahconsole when yeahconsole’s the terminal emulator that I moved to yakuake from! I love yeahconsole, it was my first Linux-love anbd I’ll never deny that it’s an absolutely solid little app but eventually I found that it jsut wasn’t extensible enough, no transparancy for example, and that yakuake offered more by the way of customizationability - awesome app though, and far more lightweight than yakuake (for those with little RAM). :)