When comparing Guake vs Yakuake, the Slant community recommends Yakuake for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Yakuake is ranked 10th while Guake is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Yakuake is:
Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top.
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Pros
Pro Drop-down terminal
You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen.
Pro Supports transparency
Transparency is particularly useful for when you need to refer to the information displayed by application under Guake window.
Pro Hotkey support
Guake is very fast and easy to open with a customizable hotkey, meaning there's no fiddling with menus or icons.
Pro Extremely customizable
Guake's appearance is very customizable: from the transparency to the width and height of the window. You can also choose which key to use for toggling the terminal window.
Pro Available in many popular distro repositories
Guake is available in a lot of repositories for the most popular distros. This makes it very easy to obtain and install on almost any system.
Pro Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle
The global shortcut key, F12, can be used to easily toggle the terminal window.
Pro Tabs support
Guake supports tabs, while working with them is very easy.
Pro Can choose byobu as shell
You can choose byobu as shell, by adding a line to /etc/shells : " /usr/bin/byobu"
and get guake with byobu ... sweet!
Pro Drop-down terminal makes for ease of use
Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top.
Pro Very customizable
Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings.
Pro Split layout
You can easily split any tab into different windows and run several commands at the same time then monitor and change them with ease. You won't find this feature in guake or tilda!
Pro Tabs support
Yakuake supports tabs, while working with several tabs is very easy. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t
. To move through them: Shift + left/right arrow
.
Pro Monitor for activity/silence
When an activity is let working (e.g.: compiling some source or upgrading some system), and you forgot it, a nice popup and sound will alert you when the command prompt returned on that term.
Pro Unlimited scroll history
You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history.
Pro Lightweight
Opens at 40MB and stays below 100MB with some tabs splitted in four each. So if you need to have many terminals emulators opened in your desktop environment, is the a very light solution for all the features it includes.
Pro Quick search support
Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page.
Pro Quick move through splits and tabs
You can move through terminals with Ctrl+Shift+Cursors or tabs with Shift+Cursor keys, so no need to touch you mouse or pad, making working with terms even faster.
Pro Can be scripted using qdbus
Window composition and commands inside can be scripted using qdbus.
You can make desktop shortcuts to automatically create tabs, split windows and connect to ssh sessions or launch monitoring programms. Very useful.
Pro Wayland support
As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland.
Pro Save output as text
You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later.
Pro Enhanced focused terminal
You can configure yakuake to show a visual altert when you change the terminal. So even if you have many splittings and you don't use the mouse to change between them, you can easily see where you are at any moment.
Cons
Con Not cross-platform
Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3.
Con Not very responsive
Occasionally, Guake slows down and is not very responsive.
Con No font ligature
Guake uses vte for its terminal emulation, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it.
He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not.
Con Theming options are very limited, Does not integrate naturally with the DE
Con KDE Library dependencies
While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app. This makes for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue.
Con No sessions support
Con No Windows support
Con Slow
Is not slow at all. I have yakuake installed in all my computers (8) and it launches immediatly after pressing the hotkey. Must be a error from yourt side.
Yakuake has started to get really slow with the latest updates: it takes up to 3 seconds to start up after you have clicked the assigned hotkey.
Con Heavy
Not true at all. I from far one of the lightiest graphical terminals out there. Mine is 14MB with a bunch of split views and 4 tabs at the moment of writing this.
