Recording terminal sessions with asciinema

I was looking for a way to improve the README page of some of my projects by showing a recording of a terminal session to explain how to use them.

There's a few packages for that like simplescreenrecorder to produce a MPEG-4 or WebM video. And of course a GIF would the easiest to embed but it's much too heavy for that.

That's when I found asciinema, a cool free and open source solution to simplify the process.

You launch it with asciinema rec in a terminal, then do your thing, finish by typing exit, and that's it your recording will be uploaded to the website. You can then embed it with a special JavaScript player or just link to the URL with an image like the following examples.

I recorded an asciicast showing how to get the weather with forecaster:

Another one for my chess engine littlewing:

And a last one for closh:

Thanks to asciinema my README pages are much prettier now.

Tags: code