Asciinema

Don’t let your terminal be drab FREE | GITHUB.COM/ASCIINEMA/ASCIINEMA

We’ve seen a lot of eye-candy that enhances the experience in your Linux console and Asciinema, a terminal recorder that produces so-called asciicasts, is another tool designed for this purpose. You can record all your terminal activity in the form of a special script and then play it back, or even upload to an Asciinema-server instance and watch the replay in a web browser. The utility has great potential for education, sharing lessons and tutorials. Install it as a Python3 module using sudo pip3 install asciinema .

The tool accepts simple arguments, like rec, play or upload followed by the name of the cast ( *.cast ), and also comes with extra options that can affect aspects such as playback speed. For instance, here’s a typical command for playing a cast at double speed: asciinema play -s 2 name.cast Asciinema is a great way to show off tips, tricks or other cool tasks that you do in your terminal. We mentioned the terminal output colouriser and a pseudo-graphic image viewer above, as Ascii-casts are compact and can be reviewed in any text editor. To view it in a web browser you’ll need an Asciinema server, but you don’t necessarily need to start your own instance. Instead, try the publicly available one at https://asciinema.org. Your ascii-casts are private and no one will have access to them without your consent (for example, if you share the link).

You can do many fun things with Asciinema, including playing GIFs or movies with a player that supports the ASCII output. Our tests have demonstrated the smooth performance of a video recorded with Asciinema, so it’s worth trying out and sharing with your friends.