Krunner operates independently of the Plasma desktop system as a standalone application. It includes a ton of features that make it useful beyond simple command launching.

With the next version of KDE SC to be released early next year, KRunner, one of KDE SC’s most powerful feature since v4.0, is getting some major updates. The hard feature freeze for KDE SC 4.4 is already done. So, in this article, we shall look at some changes.

KDE users get a nifty little app called KRunner that allows them to run all sorts of actions on a number of different resources available to the current user. Actions vary in a number of ways, allowing users to do things like launch applications, open web pages, play music, open documents, search for files, and so on.

Guake - Quake-style terminal for GNOME
A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

If you are addicted to doing things on terminal, yakuake is your friend. Yakuake is a KDE application and it takes the standard KDE Konsole and changes it to a drop-down, on-demand terminal over your desktop and applications. This is a very handy little application

Keep a terminal application open all the time? A drop-down terminal such as Guake might suit you better. A drop-down, or Quake-style, terminal stays hidden until you call it up with a key combination.

Although a command line isn't a necessity anymore in modern desktop Linux distributions, there are many situations where it's still the most efficient way to perform and automate tasks. One good solution is an alternative terminal application for GNOME called Terminator.

A lot of people believe that you have to know how to use the terminal in order to use Linux. Other people claim you never have to touch the terminal at all. In reality, the neither group is quite right.

Yakuake is a Quake-like terminal, which means it behaves just like any console in Quake or usual first-person shooter games. It supports global keybindings and can be invoked with F12 and hided with the same keyboard shortcut when you finished your job with it. This way it will run in background but it won't eat your taskbar or system tray space.