XFCE + yakuake?

tl;dr Let me preface this by saying I realize yakuake is a terminal built for KDE (based on Konsole). I’d like to try it and don’t really grok how that would work since XFCE is emphatically not a KDE-based desktop environment.

So, I’m interested in trying the yakuake dropdown terminal, which is available via the official repos. It’s a KDE-based app (in fact, is built on top of Konsole). When I asked pacman to install it, just to see what packages it depended on, it listed an entire pile of KDE packages and some extra QT5 stuff I don’t already have.

To may lay eye, it looks like it’s trying to install enough of the KDE system to enable it to run, but not actually the whole thing?

So, my questions:

  1. Is it actually installing all of KDE, or just a … KDE runtime (?) set of packages?
  2. What would be the impact of installing these packages alongside and under an existing functional XFCE install? (tl;dr how bad would I break my GUI?)
  3. If installing this thing on XFCE is really a terrible idea and should never be done, are there any alternatives? I like the idea of having a console just drop down from the top of the screen when I need it, and then just go away again.

Thanks!

You don’t need to install all that crap just to do that.

(1) xfce4-terminal(1) — Arch manual pages

2 Likes

The first thing I do in XFCE is add a new keyboard shortcut with

xfce4-terminal --drop-down

and then the F12 key.

Does not the drop down terminal appear by default with ctrl+alt+t in Manjaro XFCE?

When swapping from KDE yakuake uses F12 and it’s easier to keep the same key.

1 Like

@merlock @SimonJ

Thanks! I had no idea XFCE could do this. Even better, running it with this flag adds an additional tab to the preferences, allowing for some drop-down specific settings adjustment.

Additionally, I just realized guake is available in the official repos. It’s a version of Yakuake built using GTK3. I’ll probably experiment with that later. Since GTK3 is alraedy part of XFCE, the install is much lighter.

I’ve also installed Tillix so I can start practicing with tiling terminal emulators.

This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.