croesnick / asciinema2gif

Generate animated GIFs from asciinema terminal recordings

asciinema2gif

Generate animated GIFs from asciinema terminal recordings.

Motivation

The asciinema tool is a wonderful way to record and share terminal sessions. Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to embed the output in places like README files on GitHub repos. This tool provides a solution for that.

Usage

asciinema2gif [options] <asciinema_id|asciinema_api_url>

  options:
    -s <size>, --size <size>      One of 'small', 'medium', 'big'
    -p <speed>, --speed <speed>   Any integer (whole number) to multiply regular speed by
    -t <theme>, --theme <theme>   One of 'asciinema', 'tango', 'solarized-dark', 'solarized-light', 'monokai'
    -o <file>, --output <file>    File to write to (defaults to 'asciicast.gif' in current directory)
    -h, --help                    Show this help.

Examples:

$ asciinema2gif --size small --speed 2 --theme solarized-dark 8332

An asciicast.gif file will then be generated for you to embed and share.

$ asciinema2gif --theme solarized-light -o "${HOME}/Desktop/another.gif" https://asciinema.org/api/asciicasts/8332

In this case an another.gif file will be generated on your Desktop. Using the full URL is useful if you want to get an asciicast not from the official website.

URL Format

asciinema2gif works by visiting the given webpage, starting the asciicast, screenshotting it repeatedly, and finally stitching it together. The /api/asciicasts/ format of an asciinema website (e.g. https://asciinema.org/api/asciicasts/8332), as opposed to the main /a/ format (e.g. https://asciinema.org/a/8332), makes this operation easier (see usage), hence why it is a requirement.

Requirements

OS X

# Requires Homebrew installed. Find it at http://brew.sh/.
# This command will install asciinema2gif and all dependencies.
brew install asciinema2gif

Ubuntu

apt-get install imagemagick gifsicle npm
npm install --global phantomjs2

Credits

• @blueyed, Daniel Hahler
• @iblech, Ingo Blechschmidt
• @tav
• @VojtechVitek, Vojtech Vitek
• @wong2, Wang Dàpéng — maintainer
• @vitorgalvao, Vítor Galvão

License

Public domain.

— Enjoy, tav <[email protected]>