When comparing Guake vs Extraterm, the Slant community recommends Guake for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Guake is ranked 11th while Extraterm is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Guake is:
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.
Specs
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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 speed
not the fastest ever, but for me its a good comprimise of features vs performance
Pro Cross platform
Pro Supports tab, splits and panes
You can set up your own layout with multiple splits and tabs.
Pro Shell integration
The shell integration makes it possible to group in command output in "frames" which show success/failure.
Pro Image support
You can view images and other data types like audio directly in the terminal.
Pro Keyboard based text selection
It is possible to go into a cursor mode where you can select text just like in a text editor. It even supports multiple cursors.
Pro Global shortcuts
You can configure global shortcuts to open the terminal.
Pro Keyboard friendly "Command Palette"
Just like Sublime, Atom and VSCode you can easily search and find commands from the drop down Command Palette.
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.
