How To Adjust Guake Terminal Width

Guake is a Quake like terminal for Gnome. While Yakuake is a lot more customizable and comes with some nice options such as split view (like Terminator), people don't usually like installing KDE applications under GNOME so if you're using GNOME, you're stuck with Guake (or some other alternatives such as Tilda). Further more, I tried the latest Yakuake in GNOME (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx) and it was very laggy (I'm not sure if it's the same in KDE too) so I'll stick with Guake for now.

One thing Guake lacks is customization: you can't adjust the terminal width for instance which is something I was really missing because having a terminal as wide a large monitor is useless. But since it's written in Python, you can adjust Guake's width by editing a file. Here is how.

Before editing the file, make a backup:

- Ubuntu 12.04 and older (Guake version older than 0.4.3):

cp /usr/lib/guake/guake.py ~/Desktop/

In case you want to restore the default values, simply copy the guake.py file from your Desktop back to the /usr/lib/guake/ folder.

- Ubuntu 12.10 (Guake 0.4.3+):

cp /usr/bin/guake ~/Desktop/

Now, to modify Guake's width, paste this in a terminal:

- Ubuntu 12.04 and older (Guake version older than 0.4.3):

gksu gedit /usr/lib/guake/guake.py

- Ubuntu 12.10 (Guake 0.4.3+):

gksu gedit /usr/bin/guake

Then search for the line that looks like this: "width = 100" - this is how the code around it looks like:

screen = self.window.get_screen()
height = self.client.get_int(KEY('/general/window_height'))
width = 100
halignment = self.client.get_int(KEY('/general/window_halignment'))

And modify the width value (percentage) to whatever you want. By default, Guake is centred but you can also modify its alignment by editing line which looks like this: "if halignment == ALIGN_CENTER:" and replacing "CENTER" with "LEFT" or "RIGHT".

Many thanks to rhigmus @ Ubuntuforums for the heads up!