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Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

asciinema.org

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Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#51

My team wrote our own implementation with a similar API to get around Asciinema's weird support for React [0]. We've been using it in our web application to play back historic terminal sessions recorded by our agent. Unfortunately it hasn't been split out from the main application code yet. Open sourcing it is on the list. [0] https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player/issues/72

How do you mean with the "weird support"? I could read the code of course, but essentially, what do you mean? :)

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#53
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

asciinema is open-source and the file format is publicly documented (asciicast)[1]. You can run `asciinema rec filename.json` to save the file locally and self-host it with asciinema-player[2]. Alternatively, there's also asciicast2gif[3] that converts asciicast json to GIF image. [1]: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/blob/master/doc/ascii... [2]: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player [3]: https://githu…

Has anyone experiences with asciicast2gif? On the surface this looks just like what's needed to make this work for me: I like the recording tools, but don't want to be forced to embed a player from a third party service. Looks like asciinema2gif relies on PhantomJs which brings withit an entire browser and is also no longer maintained. This looks very bloaty for a tool that should convert terminal input to a gif file…

I've written an incomplete ad-hoc renderer in Go: https://github.com/akavel/asciinema2gif — it worked in one case where I needed it personally, but it's missing support for a lot of escape sequences, so it most probably Won't Work For You As Is. But you're free (as in AGPL) and welcome to play with it if you like!

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#57

There are only 2 ways of pronouncing that, "Ascii enema" or "Ass cinema", both butt related... bit unfortunate.

I have been pronouncing it Askinnema in my head, because that's how people pronounce ASCII, and I then just added the suffix in what is the most natural way to say it for me - I'm ESL though.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#59
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…

Not sure about seq2gif but I think using ttyrec to capture data instead of asciinema has some benefits.

For example, ttyrec is a 33KB standalone binary while asciinema needs python. This might be a problem if you are recording something on a remote machine with limited access or resources.

You can upload ttyrec data to asciinema so nothing really changes on that front.

Re: Asciinema – Record and share terminal sessions

#60
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

asciinema is open-source and the file format is publicly documented (asciicast)[1]. You can run `asciinema rec filename.json` to save the file locally and self-host it with asciinema-player[2]. Alternatively, there's also asciicast2gif[3] that converts asciicast json to GIF image. [1]: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/blob/master/doc/ascii... [2]: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player [3]: https://githu…

Whether it is FOSS doesn't really contribute anything to solve the problem GP mentions though. The default behavior is to nudge the user to upload. One must assume this is the part of the design which allows potential monetization one day. Obviously the author may not be keen to point out this giant gap in the security of their design (it is in fact the main feature). Users might not even think about the security ris…

> One must assume this is the part of the design which allows potential monetization one day.

Oh, heaven's no! Someone might at some point try to make money from a thing they made?! From their own labor?! How awful!

Seriously: it's a stupendous tool and great service, provided free of charge and totally open source. Must we complain about the fact that they try to nudge you towards their tracking-free website, so you can see the tiny "Sponsored by Brightbox" rectangle in the footer, so that the project might yield some tiny financial return (though almost certainly not anywhere close to development costs)?

It seems to me that they've done absolutely everything right except possibly live up to the standard that apparently all open source tools should be developed by starving ascetic monks. Come on.

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