Guake is a dropdown terminal made for the GNOME desktop environment. Guake’s style of window is based on an FPS game (the famous terminal used in Quake), and one of its goals is to be easy to reach. It has been designed to be the Swiss army knife for developers wanting to increase their productivity.
With this program you can instantly show and hide the terminal with a single key stroke, run a command, and then return back to your previous task without interrupting your workflow.
Guake is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Highly configurable.
- Simple, easy, and elegant.
- Lightweight.
- Supports multi-monitor setups (open on a specified monitor, open on mouse monitor).
- Smooth integration of terminal into GUI.
- Multiple tabs – use named tabs, with names automatically set from the running command, or customize to your tastes. Guake has several modes available to manage tab. You can let guake automatically rename the tab or give you own name.
- Quick open functionality.
- Auto-configure the emulator with the option to start Guake automatically at login, and define a script
- More than 130 predefined palettes.
- Save terminal content to file.
- Open URL to your browser.
- Choose a different GTK theme than your environment.
- HTML-like anchors.
- Customizable hotkeys for tab access, reorganization, background transparency, font size,…
Website: guake.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Gaetan Semet (current maintainer) and many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Guake is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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