We use asciinema to record CLI tools terminals and add the recordings as svg to our README. We also use the recordings to replay as part of our CI. works great!

I wish it supported easy export to MP4.

    agg demo.cast demo.gif
    ffmpeg -i demo.gif demo.mp4

I'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 to be aware of before you try it is that, if you make a recording without providing a filename for it, it uploads it by default to the web site, even if you haven't created an account yet, though it doesn't make it public. So maybe don't record anything you have a responsibility of confidentiality for, or patch out that feature.

   (s)ave locally, (u)pload to asciinema.org, (d)iscard
   [s,u,d]? u

I’ve moved over to using vhs https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

| tr : " "

Useful tool, but I can't help reading the name as "ASCII Enema" every time I see it.

Cool, wonder if this could be used to record agentic cli sessions like claude code and gemini cli

How 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

This 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

The upload "feature" is very dangerous.

The best use case for me is as explained here: https://koaning.io/posts/svg-gifs/

This 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.

I am curious about the use cases where a VIDEO recording is inherently more useful than a TEXT recording of a terminal session. I have found simply using:

script session.log

... to be invaluable, especially when documenting commands that will be finding their way into a bash script or when I am collaborating with another person who will always have script available in their terminal but may have restrictions on being able to install asciinema.

I like the idea. I haven't used the tool, but what I'd love to (maybe it already does this) is to be able to take a recording and turn it into a text document showing what to run, what output to expect and so on.

Something that lets one turn a terminal recording into a document showing how to redo that thing without having to watch a video and no need to copy/paste between terminal and text editor, take screenshots and such.

Maybe this could be achieved by recording in a human readable file format and then running it via an LLM with right prompt.

Then I'd like it to record all the time.

I always have a bunch of tmux sessions running. I've set it up to save the history of all sessions, but obviously the history is one file. Something like this could resolve it nicely.

I'm using asciinema on the homepage of https://appzung.com What's also cool about it is that you can easily redact information that you would not want to expose, by simply editing the source text .cast file.

The venerable script(1) command has been around since 1979 (via 3.0BSD), and while some of the timestamping (supporting via the -r flag to feed the resultant file into the playback) and other utility functions (replay via -p are much newer, the result is the same. Record to a (mostly) text file to schlep around as needed. And it's normally included by default on most installs, including macos.

There's no upload-to-server functionality unlike asciinema, but that may be a feature for some users.

Could anyone recommend any plugins that turn asciinema recordings to SVGs that are currently maintained?

I'm aware of this one, which seems to be the only one actively maintained from when I lasted looked:

https://github.com/MrMarble/termsvg

Hoping others have different recommendations.

What would be nice about transforming to SVG is low bandwidth and ease of use for static sites.

I want to take just a second, not to talk about asciinema itself, but to use asciinema to talk about a project I just discovered recently called carbonyl.

It's a command line web-browser that uses a headless GUI browser (in this case chromium) in order to surf the web and render it to the terminal. brow.sh preceded it (powered by Firefox), but in my testing, carbonyl has much better web support.

In any case, here's a very brief demo: https://asciinema.org/a/HLHWeKE2s5bdyhUGQPBum49kx

It's so short because the bandwidth is high to use it, and asciinema.org rejects casts that are greater than 10MB

At SadServers we use Asciinema to record some scenario sessions, this is how we did it: https://github.com/sadservers/sadservers?tab=readme-ov-file#... (we still have some issues to iron out on our side)

The author Marcin is a nice fellow and as a reminder asciinema development relies on donations and sponsorships https://github.com/sponsors/ku1ik

All of the terminal effects I display over at: https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/ were recorded using asciinema and converted to gif use AGG. https://github.com/asciinema/agg

The workflow only takes a few seconds. The .cast file is output to a folder, AGG reads the .cast and creates a gif. AGG has arguments to automatically set the row/column widths and strip inactive time.

I could not find any other solution that produced high quality gifs. Asciinema is awesome.

For a workshop I embedded gifs of cli tools in PowerPoint.

It was great. The PowerPoint acted as both notes for me and the trainees who could refer to them after the workshop finished.

Only issue is I prefer sharing pdf of slide deck but I couldn't workout how to export a pdf with gif and no idea if it's possible to embed a gif in a pdf