asciinema – screencasts on the command line

A variety of good screencast applications are available for Linux, such as VokoscreenNG . However, only a few of these allow the tty to be included . This can be particularly useful on systems on which no graphical user interface is available.

asciinema closes this gap and, once installed, offers an easy way to create a screencast of the command line. Be it for documentation purposes or for the creation of training documents, the possible uses are diverse.

On a Debian GNU / Linux system, the application can be installed from the official repositories:

sudo apt install asciinema

In the simplest case, a recording is made with the following command:

asciinema rec meineersteaufnahme.cast

The recording can be by entering exit or by pressing Ctrl + D exit.

Playback takes place using the play parameter:

asciinema play meineersteaufnahme.cast

The software provider also provides the option of uploading recordings to https://asciinema.org .

asciinema upload meineersteaufnahme.cast

As long as you have not created an account there, it will be automatically deleted after 7 days. Recordings can be easily embedded or shared.

Other interesting parameters are:

• --idle-time-limit=<sec>: sets a threshold of inactivity.
• --title=<title>: indicates the title of the recording.
• --command=<command>: a command for recording can be specified via this.
• --append: appends a new recording to an existing one.

Detailed documentation is available in English on the project website.

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