22 ms·

Asciinema – Record and share your terminal sessions

275 points by andrewla 8y ago

alexbeloi 8y ago
Super cool! IMO, the killer feature is how easy it is to embed recordings into your project readme or issues/comments in markdown/html.
GiorgioG 8y ago
Still doesn't support Windows =(
- tripa 8y ago
  There's a “Contributing” link at the bottom of the page.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    People who contribute to FOSS usually don't use Windows anyway, though.
    - tripa 8y ago
      Do you have stats at hand about people who whine software isn't available for their platform?
lacker 8y ago
I read this as "Ascii enema". Yikes
- CharlesW 8y ago
  I mean, O's wouldn't be so bad. #'s would hurt.
- artgon 8y ago
  Me too. What's the correct pronunciation? "Ass-cinema"?
  - geofft 8y ago
    From the website: "asciinema [as-kee-nuh-muh"
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - OJFord 8y ago
    I've always read 'as-ski-nuh-mah', like 'ascii' + 'nema' of 'cinema' - but with the timing of 'as' + 'cinema', stress on 'scii'.
  - daveevad 8y ago
    My brain did it as ascii-cinema, which may be non-standard.
- analognoise 8y ago
  Read it the exact same way. This is a perfect example of why engineering has a separate marketing division.
jaytaylor 8y ago
Tried out asciinema earlier this year, and it is super duper cool. TLDR: Wish it included some functionality to get finished usable media artifacts out. In the end I gave up after failing to find a way to convert the resulting asciinema data files to a GIF or any other HTML-compatible media file. The open-source projects ended up not working for various reasons- broken shell scripts, abandoned projects, node.js programs that require a fully working phantomjs installation and then it still doesn't work, requiring docker (come on, really? Spin up containers just to convert to a GIF?), and these are only the problems I remember offhand. Some breadcrumbs: https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting-asciinema-output-to-gif https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting-a... "asciinema doesn't provide this natively, there are tools out there that can facilitate that for you" Right.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  This has been an issue for me. My solution so far has been to just make a wrapper html page that uses their library.
- laurent123456 8y ago
  I've used ttyrecord[0] along with ttygif[1] a while ago to create this animated gif: https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/animation/animation.gif https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/animation/animation... As far as I remember it was easy to use and the result was pretty good. Back then I've also tested Asciinema but gave up for the same reasons. [0] http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ [1] https://github.com/icholy/ttygif https://github.com/icholy/ttygif
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  Wouldn't animated svgs be a better output format for something like that?
  - sickill 8y ago
    Yup. There's project called svg-term-cli which generates animated SVG from asciicast file.
celerity 8y ago
My co-founder wrote a bit about Asciinema as part of a comprehensive comparison of terminal recorders [1]. There's a lot to love about it (wide availability, very nice JavaScript playback -- check out the Game of Life playback at [1]), but it's a bit of a chore to self host, if that's important for you. [1]: https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/ https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  The difficulty in self-hosting was what prevented us from using this at my job. Proprietary source code, and whatnot.
  - sickill 8y ago
    asciinema dev here. Where did you get impression it's proprietary? I'm really curious because it's fully open-source, with all components open-source and usable independently, and there's no company or business model behind it. Just me and my spare hobby time.
lasekar 8y ago
Visual Studio Code LiveShare extension also has terminal sharing, but not with recording, simply being able to work with the remote's terminal.
kashifr 8y ago
With all the terminal recordings I have seen, the content eventually ends up at the bottom. It would be awesome to have the cursor always stay in the middle... any idea if thats possible with Asciinema?
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Why do you want to have it in the middle? Then you waste half the screen space right? If you want it to push from the top, I could understand... but in the middle?
JepZ 8y ago
Sometimes you wonder how something that is so widely known and has been posted so many times [1] can reach No. 1... but yeah, its cool. [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&pr...
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Perhaps because it has lots of fans who like to spread the word? I use it only very occasionally, like once a year, but love the way it works. My first experience was perfect, I really couldn't think of a single thing to improve (and that's very rare), so that left a very good impression.
ythn 8y ago
Or just the `script` command? http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html Still, that's pretty sick that you can pause the "video" and highlight/copy/paste in-browser
- geofft 8y ago
  The script command doesn't record timing data, so it's not very useful for playback. It's designed for transcripts, not for videos.
  - steki 8y ago
    on linux it is does have timing recording try with script -tshell_recording.time shell_recording.script bash scriptreplay -t shell_recording.time shell_recording.script
  - ythn 8y ago
    Per the man page, `script -t` captures timing data which you can playback easily with `scriptreplay -t` http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html
    - sickill 8y ago
      Yes but script command on *BSD and macOS doesn't support this. Long long time ago asciinema was wrapping script then doing upload. But it work only on Linux and I wanted it to work for users of other Unix-like systems so here we are.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
loeg 8y ago
This is really cool, and if I wanted to host a demo on a public website or something like that (attempting to keep bandwidth use down), I would use it in a heartbeat. My use case for terminal demos is very different from that. Usually I'm just recording something short and emailing it to one person. Bandwidth savings do not accumulate across many website visitors, and simple is perfect. The nice thing about video is I can just email it. I don't need to host a web server instance for playback. Even at very high quality settings ("ffmpeg -qscale:v 1", nothing blurry about it) the resulting video is only about 1MB/minute (80x24 term, h264 or h265). Here's my demo workflow, in case folks are curious: 1. simplescreenrecorder to record terminal window + voice. 2. ffmpeg -i recorded.mkv -vcodec libx264 -qscale:v 1 -acodec aac encoded.mp4 # or s/264/265/ for slightly better compression, if the receiver has new enough codecs 3. Email the video or whatever. That's it.
- xfer 8y ago
  You can send the recording(json file) of asciinema too and it's significantly smaller in size. The receiver does need to haveasciinema installed to playback though.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Nadya 8y ago
  The main killer feature, in my opinion, is that you can pause and copy and paste the text from any given point. Not that you can record and share terminal session, which you could do with basically any video recording software. For example, at 00:11 of https://asciinema.org/a/139514 https://asciinema.org/a/139514 Puzzle: 54-14343245-14134544-48EW.53NE 1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4 1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4 ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ 8 │ │ │ │━│ │ │ │ │ 5 8 │ │┏│━│━│┓│ │ │ │ 5 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 7 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 7 │ │┃│ │ │┗│━│┓│ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 6 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 2 6 │ │┃│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 2 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ A │━│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 3 A │━│┛│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 3 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 4 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 4 │ │ │ │ │┏│━│┛│ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3 3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1 1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1 └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ 1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8
advisedwang 8y ago
This fixes my main grievance with ttyrec: no seeking!
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  tty-player [1] gives you seekability, scrolling, and copy/paste with standard ttyrec files. Much easier for self-hosting than Asciinema and permits the use of other existing tools that work with ttyrec output. [1] http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info
slavik81 8y ago
I think I was pushing the limits of what the service could handle with my fluid simulations. They're pretty choppy on first playback, but run smoothly the second time. Block - https://asciinema.org/a/125371 https://asciinema.org/a/125371 Waterfall - https://asciinema.org/a/125380 https://asciinema.org/a/125380
- warent 8y ago
  Those are worth an HN thread of their own imo. Maybe a blog post or github page explaining how you did this
  - slavik81 8y ago
    I built it to be a reference implementation for "Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics" (1st Ed.) by Robert Bridson. The book is a cleaned up version of his free course notes. If I had the time, I'd clean up the code a little because the book already has a great explanation of how it works. https://github.com/cgmb/euler https://github.com/cgmb/euler
- czardoz 8y ago
  Wow!
- bewuethr 8y ago
  These remind me of the ASCII fluid submission [0] at IOCCC 2012 [1] by Yusuke Endoh. The source [2] itself can be used as an input to the program (see video [3]), and he also made a colour version [4]. [0]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html [1]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012 https://www.ioccc.org/2012 [2]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1.c [3]: https://youtu.be/QMYfkOtYYlg https://youtu.be/QMYfkOtYYlg [4]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1_color.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1_color.c
  - slavik81 8y ago
    That was one of the inspirations for my work. His simulation is Lagrangian (particle-based) while mine is Eularian (grid-based).
moistoreos 8y ago
Don't forget you can take the recording and turn it into an animated GIF: https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif Super useful for sharing because then the other parties don't need this software installed.
airstrike 8y ago
I swear I can't be the only one who's bugged by the fact that the link to the recording[0] doesn't actually play out the same way as the session you just watched in the front page![1] [0] https://asciinema.org/a/17648 https://asciinema.org/a/17648 [1] https://asciinema.org/ https://asciinema.org/
- eat_veggies 8y ago
  Yep, this looks like the link it should be: https://asciinema.org/a/113463 https://asciinema.org/a/113463
- daveevad 8y ago
  how on earth does copy/paste work from inside a video? i'm way more confused than disappointed and wonder how easy it would be to rip this for use in a non-public environment?
  - namibj 8y ago
    This is a JSON-based container format for timestamped terminal sequences, including the terminal dimensions, the shell and the terminal used. (i.e., values of SHELL and TERM). See this minimal example [0]: {"timestamp": 1526123655, "version": 2, "height": 55, "env": {"SHELL": "/bin/bash", "TERM": "screen"}, "width": 179} [0.046457, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "] [3.021128, "o", "l"] [3.116894, "o", "s"] [3.468747, "o", "\r\n"] [3.472283, "o", "\u001b[0m\u001b[01;32mind3xlite\u001b[0m LICENSE main.c main.h Makefile README.md sqlite3.c sqlite3.h sqlite3.o\r\n"] [3.472869, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "] [4.092707, "o", "e"] [4.340945, "o", "x"] [4.548934, "o", "i"] [4.653126, "o", "t"] [4.859118, "o", "\r\n"] [4.859605, "o", "exit\r\n"] As you can see, it was easy for me to redact the user and hostname from the prompt, without you even seeing it. The canonical implementation is in python (3 iirc), but you should be able to hook a non-x11 terminal emulator up and make that spew out frames for each individual timestamp, and just create a variable framerate mkv from that. With uncompressed video. This is then trivial to feed into ffmpeg for transcoding into your favourite codec, possibly even including a different stream for audio into the resulting mux. I might, if I'd get a reason to do this before other projects, take an existing terminal emulator and teach that to do this (or possibly directly to lossless VC1, removing the need to search for matching glyphs later in the process, which should yield reasonably small files directly from the conversion, without quality loss). So, if someone want's me to do this, email's in my profile.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Also see ttyrec, for a standalone terminal recording/playback utility: http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/
Patrick_Devine 8y ago
I discovered that my dockers demonstration isn't updating the background colour correctly through asciinema. It looks good on my terminal, but maybe I have old man eyes. https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo
domakidis 8y ago
I last used Asciinema when presenting my thesis. It certainly gave the presentation a nice vibe, but I still had to fire up a real terminal window when answering questions.
decafb 8y ago
I just wish they added a "live" presentation feature like the unmaintained "play it again sam" (https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam) had.
- namibj 8y ago
  Support for the necessary recording is available since version 2.0.0. This can be done via jq [0]. See the simple script [1] I made. It relies on things like tab-expansion yielding the same results, so beware. [0]: https://github.com/stedolan/jq https://github.com/stedolan/jq [1]: https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt (License: AGPLv3, credit to my handle)
  - decafb 8y ago
    Wow - happens rare but I really can't understand your answer. I never would have guessed jq to have any use for presentation. Can you give a short example how to apply your script.
    - namibj 8y ago
      Uh, just feed it the resulting file from asciinema rec --stdin and it will execute whatever was in there. If some programs were reading more than they actually wanted, it would have trouble, because they would likely get fed further commands/input, which would no longer go to the shell/later program. Regarding the script, it's just using jq because asciinema uses a JSON-based format, of which some data needs to be extracted. It should be self-evident from looking at what jq is doing and what an interactive shell does different from a non-interactive one (hint: it's related to autocompletion), as well as a sample file created by the above command. If you still don't understand, tell, and I'll try to explain better. And sorry for the delay, I wasn't expecting a timely response that asks me for something.
      - decafb 8y ago
        Thanks for the reply. Doesn't happen every day someone answers your sorrows with a two liner. I don't really see at what points it is checking for my pressed keys. I just was able to try your snippet. Unfortunately I do not get it to work - I just end up with lines like `ls: no such file or directory`.

275 points by andrewla 8y ago

Super cool! IMO, the killer feature is how easy it is to embed recordings into your project readme or issues/comments in markdown/html.

GiorgioG 8y ago

Still doesn't support Windows =(

tripa 8y ago
There's a “Contributing” link at the bottom of the page.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  People who contribute to FOSS usually don't use Windows anyway, though.
  - tripa 8y ago
    Do you have stats at hand about people who whine software isn't available for their platform?

lacker 8y ago

I read this as "Ascii enema". Yikes

CharlesW 8y ago
I mean, O's wouldn't be so bad. #'s would hurt.
artgon 8y ago
Me too. What's the correct pronunciation? "Ass-cinema"?
- geofft 8y ago
  From the website: "asciinema [as-kee-nuh-muh"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- OJFord 8y ago
  I've always read 'as-ski-nuh-mah', like 'ascii' + 'nema' of 'cinema' - but with the timing of 'as' + 'cinema', stress on 'scii'.
- daveevad 8y ago
  My brain did it as ascii-cinema, which may be non-standard.
analognoise 8y ago
Read it the exact same way. This is a perfect example of why engineering has a separate marketing division.

jaytaylor 8y ago

Tried out asciinema earlier this year, and it is super duper cool. TLDR: Wish it included some functionality to get finished usable media artifacts out. In the end I gave up after failing to find a way to convert the resulting asciinema data files to a GIF or any other HTML-compatible media file. The open-source projects ended up not working for various reasons- broken shell scripts, abandoned projects, node.js programs that require a fully working phantomjs installation and then it still doesn't work, requiring docker (come on, really? Spin up containers just to convert to a GIF?), and these are only the problems I remember offhand. Some breadcrumbs: https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif https://www.google.com/search?q=asciinema+convert+to+gif https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting-asciinema-output-to-gif https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/314235/converting-a... "asciinema doesn't provide this natively, there are tools out there that can facilitate that for you" Right.

fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
This has been an issue for me. My solution so far has been to just make a wrapper html page that uses their library.
laurent123456 8y ago
I've used ttyrecord[0] along with ttygif[1] a while ago to create this animated gif: https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/animation/animation.gif https://raw.github.com/laurent22/massren/animation/animation... As far as I remember it was easy to use and the result was pretty good. Back then I've also tested Asciinema but gave up for the same reasons. [0] http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ [1] https://github.com/icholy/ttygif https://github.com/icholy/ttygif
dcbadacd 8y ago
Wouldn't animated svgs be a better output format for something like that?
- sickill 8y ago
  Yup. There's project called svg-term-cli which generates animated SVG from asciicast file.

celerity 8y ago

My co-founder wrote a bit about Asciinema as part of a comprehensive comparison of terminal recorders [1]. There's a lot to love about it (wide availability, very nice JavaScript playback -- check out the Game of Life playback at [1]), but it's a bit of a chore to self host, if that's important for you. [1]: https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/ https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
The difficulty in self-hosting was what prevented us from using this at my job. Proprietary source code, and whatnot.
- sickill 8y ago
  asciinema dev here. Where did you get impression it's proprietary? I'm really curious because it's fully open-source, with all components open-source and usable independently, and there's no company or business model behind it. Just me and my spare hobby time.

lasekar 8y ago

Visual Studio Code LiveShare extension also has terminal sharing, but not with recording, simply being able to work with the remote's terminal.

kashifr 8y ago

With all the terminal recordings I have seen, the content eventually ends up at the bottom. It would be awesome to have the cursor always stay in the middle... any idea if thats possible with Asciinema?

lucb1e 8y ago
Why do you want to have it in the middle? Then you waste half the screen space right? If you want it to push from the top, I could understand... but in the middle?

JepZ 8y ago

Sometimes you wonder how something that is so widely known and has been posted so many times [1] can reach No. 1... but yeah, its cool. [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=asciinema&sort=byPopularity&pr...

lucb1e 8y ago
Perhaps because it has lots of fans who like to spread the word? I use it only very occasionally, like once a year, but love the way it works. My first experience was perfect, I really couldn't think of a single thing to improve (and that's very rare), so that left a very good impression.

ythn 8y ago

Or just the `script` command? http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/script.1.html Still, that's pretty sick that you can pause the "video" and highlight/copy/paste in-browser

geofft 8y ago
The script command doesn't record timing data, so it's not very useful for playback. It's designed for transcripts, not for videos.
- steki 8y ago
  on linux it is does have timing recording try with script -tshell_recording.time shell_recording.script bash scriptreplay -t shell_recording.time shell_recording.script
- ythn 8y ago
  Per the man page, `script -t` captures timing data which you can playback easily with `scriptreplay -t` http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/scriptreplay.1.html
  - sickill 8y ago
    Yes but script command on *BSD and macOS doesn't support this. Long long time ago asciinema was wrapping script then doing upload. But it work only on Linux and I wanted it to work for users of other Unix-like systems so here we are.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

loeg 8y ago

This is really cool, and if I wanted to host a demo on a public website or something like that (attempting to keep bandwidth use down), I would use it in a heartbeat. My use case for terminal demos is very different from that. Usually I'm just recording something short and emailing it to one person. Bandwidth savings do not accumulate across many website visitors, and simple is perfect. The nice thing about video is I can just email it. I don't need to host a web server instance for playback. Even at very high quality settings ("ffmpeg -qscale:v 1", nothing blurry about it) the resulting video is only about 1MB/minute (80x24 term, h264 or h265). Here's my demo workflow, in case folks are curious: 1. simplescreenrecorder to record terminal window + voice. 2. ffmpeg -i recorded.mkv -vcodec libx264 -qscale:v 1 -acodec aac encoded.mp4 # or s/264/265/ for slightly better compression, if the receiver has new enough codecs 3. Email the video or whatever. That's it.

xfer 8y ago
You can send the recording(json file) of asciinema too and it's significantly smaller in size. The receiver does need to haveasciinema installed to playback though.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Nadya 8y ago
The main killer feature, in my opinion, is that you can pause and copy and paste the text from any given point. Not that you can record and share terminal session, which you could do with basically any video recording software. For example, at 00:11 of https://asciinema.org/a/139514 https://asciinema.org/a/139514 Puzzle: 54-14343245-14134544-48EW.53NE 1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4 1 4 1 3 4 5 4 4 ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ 8 │ │ │ │━│ │ │ │ │ 5 8 │ │┏│━│━│┓│ │ │ │ 5 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 7 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 7 │ │┃│ │ │┗│━│┓│ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 6 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 2 6 │ │┃│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 2 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ A │━│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 3 A │━│┛│ │ │ │ │┃│ │ 3 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 4 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 4 │ │ │ │ │┏│━│┛│ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3 3 │ │ │ │ │┗│ │ │ │ 3 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 2 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 4 ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ 1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1 1 │ │ │ │┃│ │ │ │ │ 1 └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ 1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 B 5 6 7 8

advisedwang 8y ago

This fixes my main grievance with ttyrec: no seeking!

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
tty-player [1] gives you seekability, scrolling, and copy/paste with standard ttyrec files. Much easier for self-hosting than Asciinema and permits the use of other existing tools that work with ttyrec output. [1] http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info

slavik81 8y ago

I think I was pushing the limits of what the service could handle with my fluid simulations. They're pretty choppy on first playback, but run smoothly the second time. Block - https://asciinema.org/a/125371 https://asciinema.org/a/125371 Waterfall - https://asciinema.org/a/125380 https://asciinema.org/a/125380

warent 8y ago
Those are worth an HN thread of their own imo. Maybe a blog post or github page explaining how you did this
- slavik81 8y ago
  I built it to be a reference implementation for "Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics" (1st Ed.) by Robert Bridson. The book is a cleaned up version of his free course notes. If I had the time, I'd clean up the code a little because the book already has a great explanation of how it works. https://github.com/cgmb/euler https://github.com/cgmb/euler
czardoz 8y ago
Wow!
bewuethr 8y ago
These remind me of the ASCII fluid submission [0] at IOCCC 2012 [1] by Yusuke Endoh. The source [2] itself can be used as an input to the program (see video [3]), and he also made a colour version [4]. [0]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/hint.html [1]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012 https://www.ioccc.org/2012 [2]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1.c [3]: https://youtu.be/QMYfkOtYYlg https://youtu.be/QMYfkOtYYlg [4]: https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1_color.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/endoh1/endoh1_color.c
- slavik81 8y ago
  That was one of the inspirations for my work. His simulation is Lagrangian (particle-based) while mine is Eularian (grid-based).

moistoreos 8y ago

Don't forget you can take the recording and turn it into an animated GIF: https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif https://github.com/asciinema/asciicast2gif Super useful for sharing because then the other parties don't need this software installed.

airstrike 8y ago

I swear I can't be the only one who's bugged by the fact that the link to the recording[0] doesn't actually play out the same way as the session you just watched in the front page![1] [0] https://asciinema.org/a/17648 https://asciinema.org/a/17648 [1] https://asciinema.org/ https://asciinema.org/

eat_veggies 8y ago
Yep, this looks like the link it should be: https://asciinema.org/a/113463 https://asciinema.org/a/113463
daveevad 8y ago
how on earth does copy/paste work from inside a video? i'm way more confused than disappointed and wonder how easy it would be to rip this for use in a non-public environment?
- namibj 8y ago
  This is a JSON-based container format for timestamped terminal sequences, including the terminal dimensions, the shell and the terminal used. (i.e., values of SHELL and TERM). See this minimal example [0]: {"timestamp": 1526123655, "version": 2, "height": 55, "env": {"SHELL": "/bin/bash", "TERM": "screen"}, "width": 179} [0.046457, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "] [3.021128, "o", "l"] [3.116894, "o", "s"] [3.468747, "o", "\r\n"] [3.472283, "o", "\u001b[0m\u001b[01;32mind3xlite\u001b[0m LICENSE main.c main.h Makefile README.md sqlite3.c sqlite3.h sqlite3.o\r\n"] [3.472869, "o", "namibj@nb:~/git/namibj/ind3xlite$ "] [4.092707, "o", "e"] [4.340945, "o", "x"] [4.548934, "o", "i"] [4.653126, "o", "t"] [4.859118, "o", "\r\n"] [4.859605, "o", "exit\r\n"] As you can see, it was easy for me to redact the user and hostname from the prompt, without you even seeing it. The canonical implementation is in python (3 iirc), but you should be able to hook a non-x11 terminal emulator up and make that spew out frames for each individual timestamp, and just create a variable framerate mkv from that. With uncompressed video. This is then trivial to feed into ffmpeg for transcoding into your favourite codec, possibly even including a different stream for audio into the resulting mux. I might, if I'd get a reason to do this before other projects, take an existing terminal emulator and teach that to do this (or possibly directly to lossless VC1, removing the need to search for matching glyphs later in the process, which should yield reasonably small files directly from the conversion, without quality loss). So, if someone want's me to do this, email's in my profile.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Also see ttyrec, for a standalone terminal recording/playback utility: http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/ http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/

Patrick_Devine 8y ago

I discovered that my dockers demonstration isn't updating the background colour correctly through asciinema. It looks good on my terminal, but maybe I have old man eyes. https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo https://asciinema.org/a/tlpahVHp6cAUsdznznBCExGDo

domakidis 8y ago

I last used Asciinema when presenting my thesis. It certainly gave the presentation a nice vibe, but I still had to fire up a real terminal window when answering questions.

decafb 8y ago

I just wish they added a "live" presentation feature like the unmaintained "play it again sam" (https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam https://github.com/rfk/playitagainsam) had.

namibj 8y ago
Support for the necessary recording is available since version 2.0.0. This can be done via jq [0]. See the simple script [1] I made. It relies on things like tab-expansion yielding the same results, so beware. [0]: https://github.com/stedolan/jq https://github.com/stedolan/jq [1]: https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt https://0x0.st/sj0G.txt (License: AGPLv3, credit to my handle)
- decafb 8y ago
  Wow - happens rare but I really can't understand your answer. I never would have guessed jq to have any use for presentation. Can you give a short example how to apply your script.
  - namibj 8y ago
    Uh, just feed it the resulting file from asciinema rec --stdin and it will execute whatever was in there. If some programs were reading more than they actually wanted, it would have trouble, because they would likely get fed further commands/input, which would no longer go to the shell/later program. Regarding the script, it's just using jq because asciinema uses a JSON-based format, of which some data needs to be extracted. It should be self-evident from looking at what jq is doing and what an interactive shell does different from a non-interactive one (hint: it's related to autocompletion), as well as a sample file created by the above command. If you still don't understand, tell, and I'll try to explain better. And sorry for the delay, I wasn't expecting a timely response that asks me for something.
    - decafb 8y ago
      Thanks for the reply. Doesn't happen every day someone answers your sorrows with a two liner. I don't really see at what points it is checking for my pressed keys. I just was able to try your snippet. Unfortunately I do not get it to work - I just end up with lines like `ls: no such file or directory`.