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Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

asciinema.org

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Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#21

Post by awalton »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #9

If you feel like using asciinema or similar on your readme - please consider using plain text instead. This fancy players: - are unfriendly to visually impaired people - are unfriendly to the many people with low bandwith in the global south - require you to watch the play instead of scanning through text with your eyes - cannot be searched for text strings easily - cannot be easily used in a terminal or without a br…

> please consider using plain text instead

You do understand this is a false dichotomy? You can have both. Some people would rather watch a video and follow along, whereas others get more out of reading text... and both fit neatly on a page right next to one another.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#22

Post by lol768 »

csdvrx wrote: post #18

Let me be the devil advocate: why not use ttyrec + seq2gif instead? Or check https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/ if you don't like my recommendation ttyrec is a standard format that most people and tools understand. And if you want something fancy that asciinema output, you can use seq2gif which support all the bells n whistles asciinema does, while allowing you to also upload the ttyrec file. However, I woul…

>Let me be the devil advocate: why not use ttyrec + seq2gif instead?

GIFs look poor - they don't capture colours well. They're not accessible. They don't zoom. Copy and paste doesn't work.

>And if you want something fancy that asciinema output, you can use seq2gif which support all the bell n whites asciinema does, while allowing you to also upload the ttyrec file.

Unless I'm missing something obvious (possible!), seq2gif makes a GIF file. How does this "support all the bell n whites asciinema does"?

>However, I would suggest not using unicode or Ansi color in your recordings.

It's 2019, there's no excuse for these (and emoji!) not working fine.

>You want to demo a feature, not show your cool terminal or the amazing gif you made. The gif is just a byproduct. Keeping to plain text as much as possible makes your recording available to people using text terminals and Braille screen readers.

Agreed - how does seq2gif fit in with this? Or are you saying the ttyrecord files are more accessible?

It looks like a binary format, I have nothing on my system that can read it. I do have a web browser, though.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#23

Post by skocznymroczny »

csdvrx wrote: post #18

Let me be the devil advocate: why not use ttyrec + seq2gif instead? Or check https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/ if you don't like my recommendation ttyrec is a standard format that most people and tools understand. And if you want something fancy that asciinema output, you can use seq2gif which support all the bells n whistles asciinema does, while allowing you to also upload the ttyrec file. However, I woul…

For the same reason people still refer to this reply on Dropbox announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 . Just because you can stitch together several commandline utilities, doesn't mean the endusers want it. This tool looks like it offers convenience, everything is in a single binary, and it's simple to use.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#24

Post by CGamesPlay »

csdvrx wrote: post #18

Let me be the devil advocate: why not use ttyrec + seq2gif instead? Or check https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/ if you don't like my recommendation ttyrec is a standard format that most people and tools understand. And if you want something fancy that asciinema output, you can use seq2gif which support all the bells n whistles asciinema does, while allowing you to also upload the ttyrec file. However, I woul…

GIFs are worse in my perspective than Asciinema. You can't select the text in a GIF, you can't pause or seek in them, and they take up more bandwidth as the video gets longer.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#25

Post by signa11 »

'script' also does something similar, and is one of the lesser known commands.

from the man page:

       script  makes a typescript of everything displayed on your ter‐
       minal.  It is useful for students who need a hardcopy record of
       an  interactive session as proof of an assignment, as the type‐
       script file can be printed out later with lpr(1).

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#26

Post by dugo »

I have automated a few installations of historical operating systems in qemu/bochs with the help of travis-ci. Due to all the ANSI output the job logs are unreadable. To see what's going on in the emulator I use an asciinema rec/asciinema upload in the build scripts. This helped me out a lot.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#27

Post by nbe »

sdan wrote: post #3

Are there any alternatives (just want to see alternatives to find which is best for my use). Either way, looks nice! Although a bit irrelevant, like the gradient!

I wrote termtosvg as an alternative [1]. It's a python program that records a shell session as a standalone SVG animation. Animations produced by termtosvg can be embedded in Markdown files or HTML pages.

[1] https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#29

Post by paulgb »

nbe wrote: post #27
sdan wrote: post #3

Are there any alternatives (just want to see alternatives to find which is best for my use). Either way, looks nice! Although a bit irrelevant, like the gradient!

I wrote termtosvg as an alternative [1]. It's a python program that records a shell session as a standalone SVG animation. Animations produced by termtosvg can be embedded in Markdown files or HTML pages. [1] https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg

I like this approach! Smaller filesize and better rendering than a gif, but just as embeddable in a GitHub markdown readme since it's pure CSS animation. Kudos, looking forward to using this.
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