March 28, 2018

Yakuake Terminal Updated With Bug Fixes And New D-bus, Wayland Improvements

Yakuake on the desktop

Yakuake, KDE Plasma's drop-down terminal that is based on Konsole technologies, received some updates and fixes, it was announced today. Being based on Konsole - Plasma's default terminal - means that it shares the same properties with it's sibling, including both settings and profiles. This is handy since color schemes, text sizes, and other settings stay common across both applications.

Once installed, Yakuake can be invoked by pressing <F12>. Pressing again will close the terminal, but not clear the session, which is nice if you need to get back to where you were instead of starting over.

Yakuake homepage logo
 
Tagged as version 3.0.5, it is mainly a maintenance release that looks to improve Wayland and D-Bus support, along with a few other things. Though the Wayland fixes were not described in detail, with the D-Bus fixes we can see the following:
  • Yakuake now installs a D-Bus service file. This allows calling its D-Bus methods even when Yakuake is not running yet- it will then be started implicitly
  • Fixed a crash due to a missing bounds check in the 'sessionAtTab' D-Bus method
  • Fixed a type marshalling issue with the 'addSession' D-Bus method that caused a noisy warning when using it via qdbus

Additional patches include icon and window tile fixes, and a qdbus error when invoked from that method was eradicated.

Yakuake
Yakuake in action, showing NeoFetch

It looks as though development work is coming along nicely, as this is the third release issued in the last 12 months. In it's 13th year since version 1, the Plasma drop-down terminal still seems to be going strong. I have to admit, once you get used to a quick <F12> anytime you need to get to a terminal, there's likely no going back. Having received a 92% score on the Open Desktop website, it's one of the more highly-rated applications.

Version 3.0.5 is already available in KDE Neon. It will also be the version shipping with Kubuntu 18.04, and should be arriving soon in a distro near you. Of course you can also install and compile for yourself for use on Plasma systems running KDE Frameworks 5.29 or higher.

Quick tip: If for some reason Yakuake is not available after a reboot, be sure to add it to your startup applications list in your system settings so it's always there for use.  It can be started from your applications menu as well.

Links: 

 

- Yakuake on KDE-Apps.com
- Yakuake homepage 

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