As user become more experienced with Linux, they almost invariably learn to love (or at least tolerate) the powerful command-line interface of the terminal. For superquick access to the terminal window, I recommend a convenient utility called Tilda, which places the terminal in a drop-down menu at the top of the screen. Press a key, and the terminal slides out from just beneath the panel. Press a key again, and it slides back up, out of sight.

To install Tilda, just search for it in the Synaptic Package Manager. Once you've installed it, you'll need to make it autostart on each boot by adding an entry within Systeme Preferencese Startup Programs (click the Add button and type tilda into both the Name and Command fields). Tilda's preferences let you set a hotkey combination to hide/unhide the prompt; I use <Ctrl-<Space> right-click Tilda's window and click Preferences to change the settings).

The beauty of Tilda is that it remains in the background. I can start a system update with 'sudo apt-get upgrade', say, and then hide the Tilda console until it's completed. I don't risk accidentally closing a terminal window and thereby killing any processes I began.

It also means that I don't have several unused terminal windows hanging around on the desktop, cluttering my view. Just as in a standard terminal window, pressing <Ctrl-<Shift>-T in Tilda will open new tabs (simply type exit within each tab to close it).