Frequently Asked Questions¶

Manual keybinding¶

If you want to trigger guake manually, for instance on system where libkeybinder3 does not work, you can register the following snippet in your window manager

dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.guake3.RemoteControl \
    /org/guake3/RemoteControl org.guake3.RemoteControl.show_hide

You can use the simpler:

guake-toggle

Please note the command guake -t will also toggle Guake but since it initialize a bit more than just necessary, it can be slower that the two previous commands.

Note on Wayland¶

There are some reports of Guake not opening when a Wayland app or empty desktop is focused. The issue has been reported on Ubuntu 17.10 LTS, Fedora 26 and Fedora 27. For more context, see issue #1041.

The workaround is setting a manual keybinding as described above. On Fedora 26, for example, this can be accomplished by going to Settings > Keyboard and adding a new custom shortcut to execute guake-toggle.

Note for Archlinux users¶

This applies to users of Archlinux based distributions too and may be of help to non Debian/Ubuntu users as well. Currently make install is optimized for Ubuntu, which does not mean that it cannot be used on other systems, but depending on your system you may have to tell make install where to install guake (the default for Ubuntu is /usr/local/lib/python3.x/dist-packages/guake).

So on Ubuntu the following commands are equivalent:

$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install PREFIX=/usr/local

On Archlinux this can be done by passing /usr as PREFIX:

$ sudo make install PREFIX=/usr

which changes the installation destination to /usr/lib/python3.x/site-packages/guake.

Note that the install script automatically determines whether to use dist-packages or site-packages.

For more details checkout the official PKGBUILD at archlinux.org, the PKGBUILD on the aur or this gist.

Why Guake crashes with Tmux and Byubu?¶

Tmux and Byobu can be used as shell instead of bash or zsh, but you should be sure to disable the “use login shell” option. If set, Guake will not be able to start. Use dconf-editor to reset this option if Guake cannot start again.