There are several utilities to record your terminal as a gif (like ttyrec). However, most of them have a number of dependencies and the procedure is rather cumbersome. ttystudio is a new tool developed with zero dependencies and support for gif and png output files.
ttystudio is mostly JS with a few C++ bindings.
Benefits
- No external dependencies, bash scripts, gif concatenation (only one gif or png generated).
- Has its own built-in gif and apng writer, imagemagick not required.
- It has a font parser to render the font during image writing so no terminal playback is required when writing the image (this also means no GUI is required at all – you can record on a remote machine via ssh).
- No glitchy frames due to imperfect GUI recording of the playback or gif concatenation.
- Will record frames even if nothing is being updated on the screen.
Installation
To install ttystudio, run:
$ sudo npm install ttystudio
Usage
To start recording, run:
$ ttystudio output.gif
To stop, press <Ctrl-q>
.
For more options, run:
$ ttystudio -h
Once you are done with gif generation, don’t forget to optimize the image.
On GitHub: ttystudio
Not working on Ubuntu:
npm WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary “node”
Scripts calling Node.js as a shell command must be changed to instead
use the “nodejs” command. See /usr/share/doc/nodejs/README.Debian
Thanks for sharing the update!