As things develop and you use your computer daily it might happen that you find out that the terminal client you are using gets in the way when it comes down to productivity. I used use lxterminal and gnome-terminal (and even xterm on a rare occasions) but as it is today I have replaced all of them with a nice top-down terminal called tilda.

Explanation: What is tilda?

Tilda is a nice terminal client which can sit on the background of your system. When you press a shortkey it will pop up and disappear once you press the shortkey again. Tilda feels very similar to guake which used to be my default choice in the past. Nowadays guake has however become unusable for me so I switched to tilda instead. I do however encourage to try them both to see which one fits.

Once you start tilda for the first time you will be guided by an easy settings configuration where you can customize colors, transparency and shortkeys, for example. The configuration tool creates a hidden foler .tilda inside your home folder. So if you happen to end up to a config that you do not like simply remove the .tilda folder and restart tilda.

To make things easier to begin with I have attached my tilda config file to this post. Save the file as a text document and put it inside the .tilda folder (replace the original config file).

Below is a screenshot of my configuration:

This is tilda running when it is nicely integrated to the desktop. Make it appear/disappear by pressing F1. The background used at this screenshot is a shortly to be released artwork I made.

And last but not least two useful terminal commands which help you out with tilda:

clear  –> clears all text which was written to to terminal making it appear like freshly started.
reset  –> Does a full reseting of a terminal with similar effects as above.

Have a great time with this top-down panel.

——–

Attachment:Tilda config file.

Open the attached pdf and copy to content inside to a new document which is named as config_0. Save the document inside .tilda folder found at your home. Use editors like gedit or kate to get the text format correct.

Edit: The background in the screenshot is now available on my deviantart gallery: The art of blue