When comparing Guake vs kitty, the Slant community recommends kitty for most people. In the question“What are the best Wayland terminal emulators?” kitty is ranked 4th while Guake is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose kitty is:
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
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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 Extensible Kitten framework
Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs.
Pro Window tiling
Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag.
Pro Tabs for multiple instances
Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts.
Pro Scrollback buffer viewer
Allows for viewing the scrollback buffer in an external pager of your choice ('less' by default, with support for 'more' and 'most'), a huge benefit for turning actions taken in a live terminal session into a script for efficiency or dissemination or collaborating on workflows.
Pro Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself
No graphical menus to clutter the screen saves system resources and time once you learn that all those options are still available from the command line within the app.
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.
