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I must be an old curmudgeon, but I see no value in this over just copying and pasting the terminal output. The idea of waiting for this thing to display text i

I must be an old curmudgeon, but I see no value in this over just copying and pasting the terminal output. The idea of waiting for this thing to display text instead of just scrolling through it drives me nuts, especially with product demos. It's like when pages steal your scrollbar, only for terminal sessions. There's not supposed to be anything sexy about terminal apps, stop trying to dress them up.

raffraffraff 3y ago
About 15 years ago, as part of our incident management process I wrote a wrapper around tmux + script that let SREs and other engineers share terminal sessions during incidents or complex / long-running operations. A feature I built in was the ability to easily record the whole session so we could capture "actual" actions (and not just the ones we could remember). Sure, you can type "history", but in a postmortem it's extremely useful to be able to play back 4 different terminals simultaneously and watch what each person did in real-time. We had a number of "sev2" incidents that we turned into "sev1" incidents while following runbooks. To be honest, the main use of the script was helping engineers use tmux even if they had never had to before (y'know, mouse clicky, familiar window management keyboard shortcuts etc, automating the process of requesting access to a tmux session, receiving those notifications, and granting access). But I definitely improved a number of runbooks or found the "aha, that's how we broke it!" by watching those replays, in particular the timing of events in different terminal sessions. An extremely useful feature in scriptreplay is the "remove all the long pauses" option.
- stavros 3y ago
  FYI, Tailscale does this natively now.
feitingen 3y ago
It's nice for recording sessions when connecting to other systems via serial or ipmi sol. Sometimes it's nice to be able to go back and see recordings of boot logs, where timing is useful, and navigating bios screens or other similar user interfaces. If it needs documenting it's nice to record it as you're doing it, and writing the documentation as you're rewatching the recording so you can copy paste the important moments. It's not so nice to rely on only a recording as documentation.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
shakow 3y ago
> but I see no value in this over just copying and pasting the terminal output Animated tutorial-like ‶videos″ of CLI that are much smaller than gifs/mp4s. I can't share them because they're not openn-source, but I made quite a few of those for consumption by other teams within my company, and they were always very much appreciated. You may find it silly, but the wow effect is very efficient to onboard people.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  CLI tutorials that you can't copy and paste from sound terrible, but to each their own I guess.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    I just copied this from the demo on TFA: > # See how easy it is to record a termina (I missed the l at the end because I copied this on my phone with the bad handlebars for selection, but I'm preserving the mistake for authenticity.)
  - bitvoid 3y ago
    But you can copy and paste from the recording. That's one of the main features presented on the linked homepage. I can even copy and paste on mobile.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    I assume this must be a drive-by comment without actually going to the website, because in the middle of the page, in an h1 tag, is the feature: "Copy & paste"
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  For true CLIs I don't see much practical benefit. A little bit in seeing live input and output, which can implicitly show things like "this supports tab completion" or "this step takes a minute to run", but that's weighted against being harder to skim and harder to handle (I can inline terminal output in a README with zero extra tools, effort, or dependencies). That said, I could see it being really useful for TUIs.
achillean 3y ago
Show a demo of the CLI without the end-user having to install anything. A recording gives a sense of the expected latency/ performance of the commands and is easier to digest for many than a wall of commands. Plus it uses minimal bandwidth so it's more efficient than a video, though you don't get audio. Imo it doesn't replace tutorials as much as it is a low friction way for people to get a feel for things.
fostware 3y ago
Internally we use them as additional context for L1 or L2 upskilling to show what's happening in the background, without having to provide access to client machines. If you're a verbal learner (reader), that's fine. This additional method covers the visual learners, while the auditory and kinesthetic learners we circle back on with smaller workshops.
miki123211 3y ago
I have used this in the past to capture what escape sequences a tool receives and emits when debugging TTY issues. There's probably a better way to do this, but I don't know what it is.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I believe `script` should be present on roughly all Linux systems. (On Arch Linux, /usr/bin/script is part of the util-linux package, which is a dependency of such illustrious packages as base and systemd.) It produces a file containing just what got sent to the terminal, no timing information. -T lets it output timing info but as a separate file. (Also in this vein, the ttyrec format is a binary format that interleaves timing and terminal output. It’s very similar in function to the asciicast v2 format, but much more compact by dint of being binary rather than JSON, and asciicast v2 has a few extra features like being able to declare the duration in the header, record environment variables, record the colour palette, and add markers. I wish asciinema had built on the ttyrec format at least for its canonical format (like WASM has the binary and text formats), and asciicast v1 was bad in a few ways, but from asciicast v2 it’s much more reasonable, and maybe when I eventually get round to doing terminal recordings again I’ll use asciinema this time instead of termrec + my own <tty-player> element, as seen on https://chrismorgan.info/blog/make-and-git-diff-test-harness/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/make-and-git-diff-test-harness....)
evmar 3y ago
For apps that show incremental progress it can be useful for a demo. Here's my build system going: https://asciinema.org/a/592924 https://asciinema.org/a/592924
soraminazuki 3y ago
How would you demo, say Vim plugins, with copy and paste?

raffraffraff 3y ago

About 15 years ago, as part of our incident management process I wrote a wrapper around tmux + script that let SREs and other engineers share terminal sessions during incidents or complex / long-running operations. A feature I built in was the ability to easily record the whole session so we could capture "actual" actions (and not just the ones we could remember). Sure, you can type "history", but in a postmortem it's extremely useful to be able to play back 4 different terminals simultaneously and watch what each person did in real-time. We had a number of "sev2" incidents that we turned into "sev1" incidents while following runbooks. To be honest, the main use of the script was helping engineers use tmux even if they had never had to before (y'know, mouse clicky, familiar window management keyboard shortcuts etc, automating the process of requesting access to a tmux session, receiving those notifications, and granting access). But I definitely improved a number of runbooks or found the "aha, that's how we broke it!" by watching those replays, in particular the timing of events in different terminal sessions. An extremely useful feature in scriptreplay is the "remove all the long pauses" option.

stavros 3y ago
FYI, Tailscale does this natively now.

feitingen 3y ago

It's nice for recording sessions when connecting to other systems via serial or ipmi sol. Sometimes it's nice to be able to go back and see recordings of boot logs, where timing is useful, and navigating bios screens or other similar user interfaces. If it needs documenting it's nice to record it as you're doing it, and writing the documentation as you're rewatching the recording so you can copy paste the important moments. It's not so nice to rely on only a recording as documentation.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shakow 3y ago

> but I see no value in this over just copying and pasting the terminal output Animated tutorial-like ‶videos″ of CLI that are much smaller than gifs/mp4s. I can't share them because they're not openn-source, but I made quite a few of those for consumption by other teams within my company, and they were always very much appreciated. You may find it silly, but the wow effect is very efficient to onboard people.

candiddevmike 3y ago
CLI tutorials that you can't copy and paste from sound terrible, but to each their own I guess.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I just copied this from the demo on TFA: > # See how easy it is to record a termina (I missed the l at the end because I copied this on my phone with the bad handlebars for selection, but I'm preserving the mistake for authenticity.)
- bitvoid 3y ago
  But you can copy and paste from the recording. That's one of the main features presented on the linked homepage. I can even copy and paste on mobile.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  I assume this must be a drive-by comment without actually going to the website, because in the middle of the page, in an h1 tag, is the feature: "Copy & paste"
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
For true CLIs I don't see much practical benefit. A little bit in seeing live input and output, which can implicitly show things like "this supports tab completion" or "this step takes a minute to run", but that's weighted against being harder to skim and harder to handle (I can inline terminal output in a README with zero extra tools, effort, or dependencies). That said, I could see it being really useful for TUIs.

achillean 3y ago

Show a demo of the CLI without the end-user having to install anything. A recording gives a sense of the expected latency/ performance of the commands and is easier to digest for many than a wall of commands. Plus it uses minimal bandwidth so it's more efficient than a video, though you don't get audio. Imo it doesn't replace tutorials as much as it is a low friction way for people to get a feel for things.

fostware 3y ago

Internally we use them as additional context for L1 or L2 upskilling to show what's happening in the background, without having to provide access to client machines. If you're a verbal learner (reader), that's fine. This additional method covers the visual learners, while the auditory and kinesthetic learners we circle back on with smaller workshops.

miki123211 3y ago

I have used this in the past to capture what escape sequences a tool receives and emits when debugging TTY issues. There's probably a better way to do this, but I don't know what it is.

chrismorgan 3y ago
I believe `script` should be present on roughly all Linux systems. (On Arch Linux, /usr/bin/script is part of the util-linux package, which is a dependency of such illustrious packages as base and systemd.) It produces a file containing just what got sent to the terminal, no timing information. -T lets it output timing info but as a separate file. (Also in this vein, the ttyrec format is a binary format that interleaves timing and terminal output. It’s very similar in function to the asciicast v2 format, but much more compact by dint of being binary rather than JSON, and asciicast v2 has a few extra features like being able to declare the duration in the header, record environment variables, record the colour palette, and add markers. I wish asciinema had built on the ttyrec format at least for its canonical format (like WASM has the binary and text formats), and asciicast v1 was bad in a few ways, but from asciicast v2 it’s much more reasonable, and maybe when I eventually get round to doing terminal recordings again I’ll use asciinema this time instead of termrec + my own <tty-player> element, as seen on https://chrismorgan.info/blog/make-and-git-diff-test-harness/ https://chrismorgan.info/blog/make-and-git-diff-test-harness....)

evmar 3y ago

For apps that show incremental progress it can be useful for a demo. Here's my build system going: https://asciinema.org/a/592924 https://asciinema.org/a/592924

soraminazuki 3y ago

How would you demo, say Vim plugins, with copy and paste?