You could use yakuake, its a drop down terminal you can activate and hide with a hotkey, I'm quite fond of it.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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I was going to suggest yakuake for the drop down ability and also because you can make the background transparent in varying degrees, thus able to see what's beneath it.
My coworker has a separate monitor tilted vertically to have a permanently open terminal window.
I don't think I would have the discipline to not use that much additional space for other things. I figured I mostly needed just three rows. For now im going with the person who just recommended using vitual desktops which on hindsite is kinda a smh kind of thing.
Yakuake
Press F12 (or whatever) -> Terminal drops down, in focus and always on top -> Press F12 again -> Terminal disappears.
thanks. I just installed it because a person recommended another roll down one and I figured kde must have something like that and searched it. Another person mentioned using virtual desktops which I could kick myself because its so obvious. Im leaning toward that.
I use virtual desktop for GUI tools. I put the volume mixer, OBS and a terminal with ncmpcpp for music. So if I need to screen record or swap inputs or change music it is all on the same key.
I use settings within kde to mimic the tiling of hyperland, but only on one vertical monitor. It allows me to snap my always used stuff to one screen in a easy to change configuration, and have free floating windows and full screen games on the left
Kde also has a "remember where this window is" setting for when it is opened and closed. That plus a hotkey sounds like what you're looking for.
On windows, macos and linux I usually keep a workspace with a full sized terminal running tmux. The same workspace switching hotkeys native to the os or wm get me there.
you know maybe that is what I should just do. I remember way back when being blown away by virtual desktops but never really ended up using it. It would be a good use case.
Yeah, the good thing about that solution is you’re not tied to a specific terminal program. Enjoy kterm, use that. Like alacritty, no problem. Have some weird need for xterm? Go for it.
Not exactly what you're asking for, but have you considered something like this?
https://github.com/Guake/guake
Press a button, terminal drops down. Press it again and it rolls back up to the top out of sight. It's based on how the console worked on Quake. I haven't used it in a while, but my guess is that depending on what tiling WM you're using you'll get different levels of weird interactions with window geometry.
oh thanks. I sorta figured I might get some interesting suggestions. I had not even thought about a hotkey setup.
Just to note, if youre using KDE, use yakuake.
Way more features, customization options, etc, and made for KDE.
thanks. I did grab that and I do like how it works. I got some really good advice from this post.
Just a future looking statement.
Once you get more familiar with the terminal...
- You will want several of them, each set up to do different things.
- You will want more than a 3 line letterbox to see command output.
I know you're not there yet, but don't let the fact that you've adopted a particular setup limit you in the future.
yeah I actually started using gnu screen and doing ctrl-fun-alt f2 but I found it a bit cumbersome and I was not using it enough. I feel a bit silly but someone mentioned virtual desktops and that is the direction im going for now. easy to move over to and keeps persistent with reboots. I have one on one side for large output and two on the right for when its not as important. that is more than enough for my current use but hopefully if I get more back into the habit I will subdivide more.
This reply is in case you want to tile in KDE. I see you already found a solution with Yakuake / Guake tool and you don't need to change to a tiling system just for that.
Well if you would use tiling window manager in KDE with the extension Krohnkite, it has a feature for doing exactly that. You can set a window to be a Dock (I manually chose the shortcut Meta+D for that) and it will attach to any side you want and not interfere with the other tiled windows anymore. And you don't have to tile every window. In example on my Desktop 4, I set it to floating everything (which is no tiling at all) for games. You basically could set this floating mode be the default and whenever you want, you can start tiling specific Desktops or windows only.
I think in kde you can right click on the icon in the taskbar and choose 'show above other windows' or something similar.
ideally it would act like the taskbar and windows would not treat it as coverable when the go fullscreen or snap. I installed Yakuake based on another comment. if I can't get any better that might do.
What desktop environment/window manager are you using?
kde plasma.