 I spend a lot of time in the terminal and because of that I like to try out new terminal emulators And but there's not that many terminal emulators out there that I haven't played with before But the other day I came across one that I never really gave a chance and I see it all the time a lot of times I review these KDE plasma Distributions on the channel I do these first look impression kind of videos where I'll take a look at a Distribution and typically in these KDE plasma distros they have two terminal emulators installed So if I switch over to this VM here, this is a VM of seduction, which is a Debian base Linux distribution They have a really nice KDE plasma Distribution and by default you have console with a K I didn't need the caps lock on there, but console with a K is Plasma's terminal and it's a really nice terminal emulator if I was using plasma I would not swap this out with anything else really nice terminal But typically you also have a second terminal emulator installed on the system called Yaquake which is a strange name and most people when they see that they're not even going to have any clue how to pronounce it Is that yaquake yaquake ya ku walkie? I mean what the heck is that like whoever came up with that name They really should have put more thought into that but hey it is what it is yaquake the name It's because it is inspired by the old quake game those of you that played quake Remember in game it had a drop-down terminal that you could get well That's what yaquake is when I just launched yaquake you notice I didn't get a terminal emulator up here It's running, but by default yaquake you toggle it to show and hide with F12 on the keyboard So if I hit F12 you see I get this quake style drop-down terminal And if I hit F12 again, it'll go away now I've played a little bit with yaquake here in the last couple of days and I gotta say I'm pretty impressed with this terminal emulator One of the cool things about yaquake is it's actually built on console So if you install yaquake you have to install console with a cave because it's basically console Just modified in a way where we have this this drop-down effect And of course you can change the size and where it appears on the screen It doesn't always have to drop down from the top and it doesn't always have to be this exact size You can adjust the size. I mean I could adjust the size with the mouse if I wanted to Also, you have the ability to do some scripting with yaquake You can launch it through a startup script and you can specify exactly how it starts up You can specify how many tabs it opens what appears on each tab It's it's got some really neat capabilities now I mentioned that it's built upon KDE's console and it really once you get into the like the menu system and go to manage profiles You'll notice you have the same profiles and both yaquake and in KDE's console. I go to configure yaquake I mean all the settings and everything look like the kinds of settings that you set in Console yaquake does have tabs built-in by default you see right now We only have the one tab open and it's just called shell. I could add another one and we have shell number two Let me launch something on this so that we can tell the difference. So there's shell one shell two with htop I'll launch another one. Let's just run an LS command just to have something else on the screen. Let's do it in long format there we go and You have keyboard shortcuts, so you can move through the tabs with the keyboard. You don't have to use the mouse You can also close tabs with the keyboard shift and the arrow keys will move you from tab to tab So right now I'm on the far right tab shell number three if I do shift and then the left arrow key I move to the shell number two tab and if I do it one more time I move to the first tab and of course shift right move you back to the right And if you want to actually move the tabs as far as the order that they're in do control shift And then left and right so if I do control shift left here I will actually move the third tab to the second spot and to the first spot And if I go right with control shift move it back to the second spot And then I finally move it back to the third spot and I believe control shift D closes the tab It does. I had to think about that some of the documentation as far as the default key bindings is a little sketchy Yaquake does have a man page. Let me go to the first tab But I don't believe that the man page actually gives you actually it doesn't even have a man page So that was one of the reasons I was having trouble finding some of the key bindings Does it have like a help flag? So if I give it dash dash help? Yeah, but there's no information here So that's one of the unfortunate things about Yaquake is Just you don't have you know a help flag and you don't have a man page as far as built into the distribution Obviously, you can go online. Yaquake does have a website. Of course, it's a KDE program So you can go to KDE's website and get information about it Also, there is a really nice page about Yaquake in the arch wiki and the arch wiki page is really neat because It includes right here Yaquake scripting and it includes like a test script here For those of you that want to I play around with the scripting and what I did is I took I think I took the top part here Which launches Yaquake? With two splits actually two tabs and it launches. I think each top on a tab or on a split I can't remember if I did splits or tabs, but let me show you this back in the VM here So I'm gonna close Yaquake Let's go ahead and quit out of it and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open KDE's console And if I do a LS you see I created this script here called Yaquake.sh Now let me open this in VM so you guys can read it and Yeah, it's a very simple script again. It's just mainly the first few paragraphs. I got from the arch wiki It's going to start each top in a tab and split to user terminal and run IO top So that comment actually tells us exactly what's going to happen now Let me make this smaller and get it out of the way and let me now start Yaquake using our startup script And we've got a syntax error here Unexpected EOF while looking for all right so line 16 Let's go ahead and take a look at line 16 and line 17 And I can already see the error here on the very last line. You see IO top I have a quote here, but it needs one more quote of course at the end of the line So let me write and quit that and then let's try that one more time and let's launch Yaquake using the startup script All right, we started it But of course it doesn't appear on camera or on screen until I do the F12 and now you can see what my startup script does it starts Basically three splits it puts H top in one. It just puts a terminal Just a empty terminal here and then I don't know why this terminal this terminal was gonna start IO top But the command is not available. It doesn't look like maybe it's not installed But anyway, this was not supposed to be a functioning script again That was just the example script that I got from the arch wiki So some really neat little functionality with Yaquake The fact that you can actually have it start with certain tabs and splits already open running certain programs I think is one of the really neat features with it and I can understand You know people have wanted me to take a look at some of these drop-down terminals before and I've always been kind of resistant Because I didn't see the point Why do I want this terminal that just appears when I hit F12 and then goes away that's typically when I'm in a terminal I'm in it for the long haul I just I'm just gonna open it up on one of my workspaces and it's always gonna be there But as some of the other features with these terminals that are nice Like I didn't expect Yaquake to have tabbing and all this scripting capability Like I really thought it was going to be a much simpler program now me as a tiling window manager user I really don't have a use for as far as needing something that has that drop-down capability Because in tiling window managers Most of them have what they call scratch pads where you can have a program that is Always available for you as far as show hide. You have a key binding to towel a program show and hide So I can open up a terminal as a scratch pad and when I'm done with it hit the key binding to hide it It's still running, you know all my information is still there But then I hit another key and my terminal can come back But if I wasn't on a tiling window manager that had that scratch pad capability Then I could see where something like Yaquake would come in handy And I know you know millions of people out there run KDE plasma It's a very popular desktop environment and you know, it's actually not bad. I mean I could use it I get you force me to use plasma You know, I could get by with it and to be honest if I was a plasma user I would probably use Yaquake. So that was just a very quick look at Yaquake. It's a program I don't think probably gets a lot of attention It's not a program I hear about all the time and just playing around with it here in the last couple of days It impressed me enough that I thought I should do something about it on camera. Now before I go I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode I need to thank Absi Dallas Gabe Lou Mitchell Allen Akami Arch 5530 Chuck David the other David Dylan Gregory Louis Paul Scott Wes and Willie they are the producers of this episode these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this great episode that you just watched It wouldn't have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names are seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon because the distro tube channel has no corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you'd like to help me out Please consider supporting me over on patreon. All right guys Peace It's a great terminal, but man that name sucks