I’m probably not the first person to think of this, but it is amusing all the same.
That’s screen, running in a vertical split inside Yakuake. In case you’ve not used it before, Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator that works in the same fashion as a few famous first-person shooter games. Ordinarily it’s not something that is particularly entertaining to me (mostly because of the KDE underpinnings, which might be avoidable), but for some reason I thought it might be nice to anchor a screen session in there.
Like I said, I’m not the first person to think of it (I never am the first person to think of things), but now that it’s in place, it’s rather fun. As you can see I run a Windows XP-Classic-esque desktop in Arch, and while it’s a complete mismatch for that look, it is very nice indeed to be able to poke one button and check rtorrent or htop. Press the same key again, and it rolls back up into the heavens, out of the way and out of sight.
Of course, Yakuake as it stands supports multiple terminal instances anyway, so screen is hardly necessary there. Terminal emulators are just too darned flexible these days. Adding screen or dvtm or both to a tabbed emulator is multiplying your work potential in a mind-boggling way. …
I’ll probably uninstall Yakuake as soon as I get finished writing this, but it’s a curious idea. Rather than kicking out a terminal window every time I need to check rtorrent and then detaching it when I’m done, this can just show it continuously. My console “screensavers” work just fine, mouse controls are supported in mc, the vertical and horizontal splits work … everything as it ought to be.
Just appearing, and disappearing, in roller-blind fashion. Cool. 😀
Motho ke motho ka botho 
You could try stjerm, which is extremely similar to Yakuake but without the KDE deps. Another similar project is yeahconsole, though I’ve not kept with yeahconsole for long because it doesn’t support hiding when the terminal window loses focus
I’ll give a thumbs up for yeahconsole. The really nice feature is that it is a terminal emulator wrapper that wraps round pretty much any terminal emulator (I use it to wrap round urxvt). This allows the user to keep on using their favourite terminal emulator with its carefully crafted custom configuration.
Below is my .Xdefults setup for yeahconsole (all other config options are inherited from urxvt but could be overridden here if one so wished)
!!yeahconsole setup
yeahconsole*term: urxvtc
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: 21
yeahconsole*toggleKey: None+F12
yeahconsole*keyFull: Alt+F11
yeahconsole*aniDelay: 40
yeahconsole*stepSize: 1
yeahconsole*handleColor: cyan
yeahconsole*borderLess: true
yeahconsole*scrollBar_right: false
yeahconsole*scrollBar: false
yeahconsole*colorBDMode: on
yeahconsole*colorULMode: on
Almost forgot if you need a terminal emulator that supports “multiple terminal instances” without installing KDE/Gnome dependencies then urxvt is worth a look, the built in tabbed pearl extension does the job (I prefer to use GNU Screen hence the lack of scroll bar in my yeahconsole config).
I’ve been using yeahconsole with urxvt + screen in openbox for a while now 🙂
I start it with this line:
yeahconsole -e screen -d -RR yeah &
so it will always attach to the same screen session (named yeah) after accidental or planned restarts of the X server.
my yeahconsole settings:
!—YeahConsole—
yeahconsole*term: urxvtc
yeahconsole*scrollBar: false
yeahconsole*restart: 1
yeahconsole*handleWidth: 1
yeahconsole*consoleHeight: 40
yeahconsole*aniDelay: 0
yeahconsole*stepSize: 25
yeahconsole*screenWidth: 1200
yeahconsole*yOffset: 16
yeahconsole*xOffset: 83
yeahconsole*toggleKey: none+F12
Quick Tip:
Try the “Scroll Lock”-Key or “Break”-Key (depending on Keyboardlayout) as activator for yakuake. This key is easy to hit and vitually never used (in my case, it is the most often used key)
Daniel
tilda is also a nice drop down terminal without the KDE depends, although it has some Gnome depends.
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