Germinator is very good for all sorts of tasks, especially when working long sessions on multiple items. But sometimes there are scenarios where you need to quickly access a terminal. In order to run a command, check a status or run a task in foreground for a long time of these without opening too many tabs. Wake is excellent in this situations, it is a handy quick to use terminal that you can open on any workspace on top of your existing windows by pressing F 12. We will install it right now with the command sudo apt install wake. apt is the new package manager that Ubuntu has launched with version 1604.
And it's meant to be an easier to use version of the apt get command with some added I candy. Now that the quake is installed, we will go to the dash and open it. To do this we just press F And once it is running, you can see the notification on the top right side of the screen. Just like with Terminator, we will check its preferences. First of all go to shell and enable open new tab in current directory. I believe you can guess what this does.
Then go scrolling and insert a really big number like 99,999. Also make sure scrolling output is unchecked. Again, we will change the default font to be monospace 16. Set the cursor blink mode to off and hit close. If you want, you can play around with the default settings to see what suits you best. We can use quake in full screen by hitting F 11.
And we can also resize it by dragging the margin. Greg does not start automatically when Ubuntu reboots. So we will have to add it to our startup application for That. To do this open the dash again, type startup applications and just click Add, just type quake in all three fields add and close. What makes it so handy is the fact that you can open it on top of your current windows at any time, quickly type of command and reopen it again later to check the status of the command. What I actually do is also make it a little bit transparent so that when it opens on top of a web page, where I have some commands written, I can still read the content on the page and type the commands as I read without switching windows.
This is yet another awesome productivity.