I was com­ment­ing on Guake in http://pierrelucbacon.com/2008/09/19/3-useful-applications/ but found that it was slightly buggy and pol­lut­ing the tray in the top panel under gnome with its icon.

A few weeks ago, I stum­bled upon Tilda which turned out to be at least equally, and so far, much more usable and inter­est­ing to use than Guake. My point behind this is that I loved the fact that the GUI is kept just as clean as I like it: a black border-less window.

Cur­rently on my sys­tem, Tilda is launched at startup (System->Preferences->Startup Appli­ca­tions) and is invoked with SUPER-A on the keyboard.

It’s good to have an unob­tru­sive ter­mi­nal at the tip of our fin­gers any­time you need it.

Here is a lit­tle screen­cast to give you  a sense of how it can inter­act on your desktop: