Now I don’t expect every one here to have played Quake so your first question would be, what is a Quake console? Well in simple terms it is a way to send text commands to the game, you see people like to customise the crap out of Quake and the console helps them by being just a button away ready to process input.

So where does Tilda come in? Well Tilda atemps to immate the behaviour of this Quake Console on linux. And what a fantasic job it does at it.

I came across Tilda only recently because I have only just started to use Linux as a development platform. You see in Linux terminal is king, I mean for just the speed at which you can get things done by using it there is no match. The only problem is that you have to run the program by clicking on an icon, now this is fine for most programs, but because I am using the terminal in such a heavy way I needed a reflex way of running it.

This is were Tilda steps in. I can just press a button and like a flash a console appears on my screen ready for action. To begin with, if you’ve played Quake before, it looks nothing like the in game console. But fear not, because Tilda can be customised, all you have to do is right click the console and choose properties. From the properties you are able to change the size and position of the console as well as choose a background picture to have to displayed in the console.

But aside from a background picture there isn’t to much you can do, I mean you can’t have an animated background like in RTCW but in all honesty you don’t really need to be able to configure that much of the app.

It’s one of those applications that does just what it’s meant to, no more and no less.

For more information on Tilda visit this site: http://tilda.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page