I wish it supported easy export to MP4.
You can do it in two commands, but not ideal to need gif as stopgap.
agg demo.cast demo.gif
ffmpeg -i demo.gif demo.mp4Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#22How is this better than basic linear scrollable text? You don't have to waste time waiting for letters to appear at a pace slower than your reading speed. You don't worry about missing a moment and then trying to rewind with the imprecise controls (and you can't use text search to instantly find the word you remember) of broken full-screen button like it's on this website when viewed on a smartphone
I generally see it used to demo a TUI, to great effect.
Good point, I mostly remember the cli sequences as shown in the demo (which are only better than the gif alternative). The TUI version should be their primary demo!
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#23I’ve moved over to using vhs https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
Looks cool, but produce GIFs? Asciinema is text based IIRC. The name is the downside of Asciinema IMO. Can’t help but read it as ASCII enema, which is funny, but not what I want think about. Just call it tty-player or something…
Did someone say titty player?
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#24This is a really nice, and very compact, way of demonstrating the terminal in action.
I used it to show off my 2002 version of ASCII pacman game, since no one's going to bother compiling it, and it'll eventually end up with bitrot.
You can see me playing it (really badly!) at https://asciinema.org/a/723703
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#25The upload "feature" is very dangerous.
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#26Cool, wonder if this could be used to record agentic cli sessions like claude code and gemini cli
Yes.
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#27I've found asciinema pretty cool and recorded a few recordings of things I've done, like some experimental Emacs commands, a computer algebra system, a Unicode Tetris game in ARM assembly, and a minimal roguelike: https://asciinema.org/~kragen . These are not the most spectacular recordings on the site, but I have found them a useful way to communicate ideas. I wish there was some kind of voiceover support. One thing…
That is so shady.
It's kind of justifiable in the sense that it's more convenient in the usual case. You say `asciinema rec`, do your thing, and then you have a secure URL to share with somebody, and you can make it public with a couple more clicks.
Actually I think this has changed, because when I tried this just now, it asked me
(s)ave locally, (u)pload to asciinema.org, (d)iscard
[s,u,d]? u
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#28Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#29The best use case for me is as explained here: https://koaning.io/posts/svg-gifs/
Re: Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions
#30This looks really useful for documentation. The text-based approach seems like a huge advantage over screen recordings. Being able to copy-paste commands from a "video" is brilliant. The privacy concern about auto-uploading is a bit concerning though, glad they added the prompt to choose local vs upload.