asciinema to record your terminal

Have you ever tried to record your terminal? Or seen anyone’s recording of their terminal? Usually people record to show how a tool works and put it in the tool’s README in the git repo. You can also record to do tutorial videos and more :)

So, my first thought to record my terminal would have been to just record my screen or terminal window using some screen recording / screen capture tool like Kap. Turns out there are other ways and tools to record your terminal ;) One such tool is asciinema

asciinema is a tool that makes it very easy to record and share your terminal sessions. It’s lightweight, and purely text based - so, not exactly a video, so, no mp4 files and such :P You can easily share your terminal sessions on the web.

You can find a brief description of how it works here and also links to dig deep too

So, how does it help? Now, usually, when you record with screen recorder and play it as a video, you cannot copy the commands shown in the video. It’s a video, so 🤷‍♂️ Now with asciinema player, it plays the terminal session and you can pause and also copy the commands in it! How cool is that? And it’s pretty lightweight and there will not be any resolution problems because it’s not exactly a video! And you can also change the theme of the terminal session when sharing and asciinema also has a platform for you to share your sessions online with your own account and sharing settings. And you don’t need the online asciinema platform to play your recording, you can play it anywhere in anyone’s laptop if you have the recording file and the asciinema tool. I’ve recorded a video to show a demo of asciinema. It’s below and you can also see the asciinema recorded terminal session in a special asciinema player below :) More about sharing and embedding asciinema recording can be found here

asciinema demo video - YouTube , Vimeo

asciinema player playing the demo recording I did is below. You can also find it here

Installation - https://asciinema.org/docs/installation

Docs - https://asciinema.org/docs

Let me know in the comments how useful this post was and how you liked asciinema. And if you have any comments on other such tools to record terminals, I would like to know about them too :)