After listening to the Lugradio podcast, a program for linux called Tilda was mentioned. It’s a rather excellent little utility for those of us who just can’t break the command line habit in linux.

The program adds a hook to a keystroke of your choice (I chose F2), which drops down an overlay-style terminal window (as in Quake and other FPSes).

A couple of usage notes:

1. I found that it needed to be added to the gnome session variables to start properly, as it kept closing on me othewise.
2. It’s tempting to hit “exit” every time you’re finished in a task.
3. The code to configure it is tilda -C. Be careful when you call this as the .tilda directory can end up with multiple config files if you use it incorrectly.

Overall, it’s pretty excellent. Now to find a way to make Windows Powershell on Vista do the same thing…

A Final Note: KDE Users can try Yakuake instead.