Ask HN: Software for producing terminal-based tutorials?

For editing, Camtasia makes it almost too easy to create nice looking title overlays with backgrounds, dimming / blurring areas, highlights, zooming / panning and other basic effects. Even pretty complicated animations too, without having to mess around with key framing or needing a video editing degree.

For example, I made the intro animation for my Docker course[0] in Camtasia in like 15 minutes by screwing around by dragging sliders around until it looked cool. Of course it's not the best thing ever, but it's one of those tools where things just feel intuitive to use without having to Google anything. That whole video is done with Camtasia too btw.

DaVanci is a much more powerful editor and you can do crazy Hollywood style animations and effects, but for someone who just wants to do typical screencasting edits, it's hard to beat Camtasia's efficiency. I'm sure with enough time you could do those things with DaVinci by making your own custom scripts and effects templates but it will take a decent amount of effort to get there instead of getting all of that out of the box.

I know ScreenFlow is also quite good. Very comparable to Camtasia. Camtasia seems to have better license terms and isn't MacOS exclusive.

There's things like Kdenlive too. I super appreciate the development work they've put into it and I think it'll improve over time, but it's not comparable to Camtasia in terms of usability when it comes to creating nice looking titles, animations, etc. I don't think you'll find anyone who would disagree if they've used both tools for a while.

[0]: https://diveintodocker.com/

You may not want to just make one big long video - its hard to follow and then find specific key points in time. Unless you are showing a lot of interactive things and just input/output, copy and paste-able code is going to be easier for students to see and adopt. You may want more of a long tutorial document with small videos where it makes sense or you want to show something interactive.

In addition, its a lot more editing if you want something good without mistakes, etc (there are a lot of videos from big name schools online where professors do not correct themselves and just post the single unedited take). I would actually use video selectively. If you want students to easily run something you may want to utilize one of the many only IDEs that can execute code.

Depending on the tools available from your school or what you can find online you can make something very useful and interactive or you could try to use something like https://www.adaptlearning.org/

That is just a hack idea and I am not Camtasia user yet.