Asciinema

https://asciinema.org/

by jmduke • 11 years ago

513 90 11 years ago

asciinema.org

steckerbrett• 11 years ago

Previously: http://showterm.io/

delinka2• 11 years ago

Are these related?

cormacrelf• 11 years ago

Only in the sense that they are pretty much dead-on the same thing and Showterm has been around a lot longer and is in wider use.

zx2c4• 11 years ago

I've stayed away from Showterm because it relies on a big rat's nest of Ruby deps. Looks like this one is written in Go, which is convenient.

steinnes• 11 years ago

I quite like this service, used it a couple of months ago (http://steinn.org/post/brute-force-still-going-strong/) although I would love it if I could change my terminal dimensions (char width/height) after recording. That way I could make the terminal window fit the surrounding container on my blog.

But A+ for usability :-)

sheraz• 11 years ago

Cool product and nice execution, but I'm a little stuck on the name. I keep reading it as ascii-enema.

vonklaus2• 11 years ago

Me too. Is this a sort of allusion to something?

lambda• 11 years ago

It's supposed to read as a portmanteau of "ASCII" and "cinema", but yeah, I can see the misreading.

elchief• 11 years ago

It's obviously supposed to be "ass cinema"

fallat2• 11 years ago

Askee-neema...? (ASCII)-nema

sickill10• 11 years ago

Pronunciation and etymology: https://twitter.com/asciinema/status/612898969073635328

StringyBob• 11 years ago

From the title I was expecting this to be a link to http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ :-)

gus_massa• 11 years ago

A better title for the submission is "Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions" (extracted from the main header of the page)

NotHereNotThere• 11 years ago

I'm not sure why, but when viewing the recordings in full screen on my Galaxy S5 in landscape mode, a bottom portion of the cast is cut out. For example in the irssi/tmux cast, I don't see the commands typed below the status bar.

nyir• 11 years ago

Wanted (or at least I wanted last time this came up): (Multiple) terminal streams in an OGG container (or similar) and integration in VLC/mplayer. Could make for nice precise output in addition to regular video instead of just having either the raw terminal or a video only screencast.

peterhajas• 11 years ago

Is there any solution for me wanting to have my recordings be private, or only distributable within a small group?

Ambroos• 11 years ago

With an account your recordings are private by default.

Thaxll• 11 years ago

Seriously when people will stop using that for installation....

"curl -sL https://asciinema.org/install | sh"

Still a cool product!

reagency• 11 years ago

What's wrong with that? It is SSL secured.

Once you agree to install software, it had local access with your accounts privileges.

DyslexicAtheist• 11 years ago

piping random shit into sh is wrong because domains go away, yet installation instructions might be repeated in countless other tutorials. easy to snap up domains and host malware.

and SSL has nothing to do with it. packages are not cryptographically signed either and once on the system can easily become root.

0x0• 11 years ago

You won't be so happy when your https connection drops after "/" as you are piping into /bin/sh:

  rm -rf /$INSTALLER_TEMP_DIR

strags• 11 years ago

We evolved packaging systems for a reason - they provide a standardized way to manage dependencies, provide clean uninstalls, etc... Having a shellscript pooping files arbitrarily into the filesystem is so 90's.

Seriously - you pretty much just have to make a .dep and a .rpm and you're covered. Is that so hard?

sysk• 11 years ago

When there will be a better alternative.

batou• 11 years ago

There's no better alternative for a very good reason.

sickill10• 11 years ago

This is something I have been fighting with in my head for quite a while. "Piping shit into sh" is not really great way to do it, I fully agree. Let me describe you the situation.

At the moment there are native packages for Ubuntu/Debian (ppa) and Fedora/CentOS (in core repo). There's also homebrew package and Arch Linux one (aur). There are 2 nice guys who maintain the first two packages, doing great job, but it always takes time until the packages are ready (we're all doing it in our spare time, and there's process, especially Fedora case, which you can't skip). I maintain Arch Linux one (while not using Arch for more than few years now) but this one's usually ready on the release day.

There are no packages for other distros, but we'll never be able to provide ones for all distros (unless we're very popular project with lots of contributors). That's fine.

But there are also situations like this: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532918 Let's not get into "Go packaging" discussion again, but what you can see in the mentioned Gentoo thread there's always some problem (no vendoring is bad, vendoring is bad). Sure, these guys do this too in their spare time and they don't owe me anything.

But when seeing this I'm like "oh boy, packaging is hard, I don't have time for dealing with this". So time (or lack of thereof) is one thing. Next thing is: "apt-get install asciinema" or "brew install asciinema" is awesome because it uses your software package manager and it's a single command. For all other distros (and people wanting new version right now) you can curl/sh which is equally easy. "First download this script, then review it, then run it" is not that hard but most people wouldn't review the script anyway, and those who would are the ones who are doing that now anyway. curl/sh sucks on many fronts but I made sure the script doesn't get executed when partially downloaded and it's not "| sudo sh".

I'm thinking about using one of these services which auto-build deb/rpm, they host them as apt/yum repos etc. There are few of them out there so if anyone can point me to any "proven/reliable" one I'd appreciate that. Any suggestions on the topic are welcome!

rickr• 11 years ago

I added an RPM package to a project that used a Makefile to spin up a docker container which then built various packages via FPM:

https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

I didn't use the build system heavily and it may be more overhead than you'd like but I thought it was a pretty neat way of doing things. Repo is here:

https://github.com/tutumcloud/tutum-agent

mpu• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be in the cloud? Can't you guys provide a player in html css whatever and the recording program to generate data files for the player so we can use your technology everywhere and are not tied to this website and its hosting policies?

/rant

halfdan• 11 years ago

Code is open source, install it https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org

Link is in the FAQ.

sickill10• 11 years ago

asciinema dev here. Please read my comment on the topic here: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org/issues/186#issuec...

Btw, the player is already a separate project: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player/tree/next

axus• 11 years ago

This reminded me about the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive, where you can play back ASCII recordings through a flash player: http://mkv25.net/dfma/browsemovies.php

Dwarf Fortress records the game to CMV format: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Jifodus/CMV_file...

dpacmittal• 11 years ago

How does it work?

biot• 11 years ago

https://asciinema.org/docs/how-it-works

technologia• 11 years ago

I've been using Asciinema and personally I love this product. I don't have to make my recordings for demos or presentations nor do I have to do live presentations, just pre-record and let everyone view it themselves while I present so they can follow along at their own pace.

Its been great as a teaching tool as well. We've been running it on our internal network but its always hilarious to see which people accidentally have it running so we get to see people do some really dumb shit during their terminal sessions.

crazdkoder• 11 years ago

This is very cool. I'd love to adapt it to help members of my team collaborate and share workflows, but GPL makes it hard to integrate with any internal tooling.

okal• 11 years ago

Should be fine as long as you're not distributing binaries, and the code stays internal.

oadam• 11 years ago

I was about to write few blog post about hacking some websites and servers, now it's pretty cool to record live and post later to blog.

modfodder2• 11 years ago

I was really hoping this was short animated clips of famous movie scenes rendered in ASCII.

_jomo• 11 years ago

Here you go: https://asciinema.org/a/6heuukhda9ozykt72gkw5fkog :)

modfodder2• 11 years ago

Now that is what I was hoping for.

pareshverma91• 11 years ago

Looks great. But I think quite a few people (the audience with which the recording would be shared) would like to see the entire session at once instead of watching the entire video. It would also be helpful for the writer to quickly verify if they missed something.

cooper122• 11 years ago

Yeah maybe a button to "View Transcript"

tacone• 11 years ago

Impressive.

swader2• 11 years ago

I'm disappointed to see this getting so much traction when showterm.io is clearly the superior product with rewinds, custom speeds, scrolling up and down and linking to a specific point in time, and has been around so much longer. Here is an example of a longer Showterm session: http://showterm.io/a0616ce5e6f411f292e18 taken from http://www.bitfalls.com/2013/08/autofight-php-job-interview-...

mitchty• 11 years ago

That is cool and all, but its really really annoying the amount of history that thing throws at your browser.

Took about 10 tries of going back as far as the history would allow to get back here. I hate sites that do that junk.

sickill10• 11 years ago

asciinema is here since 2011 (although it was called ascii.io until 2 years ago).

As for rewinds, you can click on the progress bar to jump to a time you want. Also, the upcoming version of the player supports fast-forward/rewind/jump keyboard shortcuts: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player/blob/next/src/...

As for the playback speed you can set speed, theme, font size etc (embedding docs say this - https://asciinema.org/docs/embedding), and you can append these options to any asciicast URL too, like this: https://asciinema.org/a/21743?speed=5&theme=solarized-dark

Looks like these are not easily discoverable from the player UI, so noting this down. Thanks for bringing this up!

swader2• 11 years ago

Ok, that's quite a bit of news. Thanks for clarifying, shines a new light on things.

tobbyb• 11 years ago

ttyrec is a tiny terminal utility that does this on your terminal. It was released in 2000, it's one of those nice little gems one is glad to discover. It records and playbacks terminal sessions. The recorded files are in kb's. [1]

It's simple to use. 'ttyrec filename' starts recording, ctrl-c to stop recording. 'ttyplay filename' to playback.

Of course with asciinema.org, you get the benefit of an html player for the files, that you can link and playback on your own website.

[1]http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en [2]http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/ttyrec.1.h...

jmaygarden• 11 years ago

I first came across ttyrec for use in saving NetHack replays.

http://alt.org/nethack/

fallat2• 11 years ago

You know this calls for a ttyrec html player...!

chrismorgan3• 11 years ago

I’ve spent the last week producing just that, and I’m just applying final polish before publishing it. It’s a drop-in replacement for <video>.

miles2• 11 years ago

I love script[1,2] for this sort of thing. Why wait for a video to play? Or host it on a third-party site? Having the entire session visible on a single, static page is less frustrating in most circumstances I encounter.

Having said that, Asciinema certainly looks like fun.

[1] http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?script [2] Sample session: https://tinyapps.org/blog/nix/201107170745_copy_terminal_tex...

ezequiel-garzon• 11 years ago

I was thinking the same thing... but then I realized it works, say, for an ed session, but not for a vi session. Of course, all that visual mode nonsense is just bloatware ;).

miles2• 11 years ago

When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

yzh• 11 years ago

I really love lolcat. It makes my day. I'm making alias and adding lolcat -f allover my bashrc files now :-)

mrschwabe2• 11 years ago

It's be great to have a polished product like this but for programming sessions in a text editor like Sublime.

cooper122• 11 years ago

Just curious, what benefit would this have over something like git? Just to show your programming process?

m_mueller• 11 years ago

some people like to watch a screencast video instead of reading through documentation. It's not a bad way to get introduced to a new language or framework, for example.

mrschwabe2• 11 years ago

Looking at a git diff is one thing, but seeing the commit as it was coded would introduce the dimension of time; giving you better context for how everything came together.

Add some interactive controls for slow-mo/fast-forward or scrubbing forward/back and you would have a powerful tool for learning & review.

Merovius• 11 years ago

That might be against the point of this project, but I really miss the possibility of an audio-overlay. I found the demo really stress- and unhelpfull, because you have to read rockey text while typed in absolute silence… brrr. I'd rather talk while typing and explain what I am doing and have that synched to the recorded text-session.

daurnimator• 11 years ago

If you don't know about it, check out the unix command 'script'. You can use it to stream or record terminal sessions.

chrismorgan3• 11 years ago

I find the timing of this amusing—I was just, in putting the finishing touches on my own project <tty-player> which is basically <video> but with ttyrec scripts for src, writing down my analysis of all the different options there are out there, and I saw this entry up here just as I was writing about asciinema.

asciinema’s player has the distinction of being the only one I know of not based on term.js (https://github.com/chjj/term.js).

userbinator• 11 years ago

On the subject of amusing names, since this one looks so similar to "ascii enema", wouldn't yours be the "titty player"? :-)

pixelbeat• 11 years ago

Another option for the common case of static output is to render command or script(1) outout directly to static html with something like http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh

nichochar• 11 years ago

It's really bad to curl | sh. You shouldn't do it, and you shouldn't recommend doing it...

The app looks neat though, good job

sickill10• 11 years ago

Yeah, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755166

nevalau• 11 years ago

I have used Asciinema couple of weeks now and I am very happy with it.

Our open source project contains a command line tool for Docker orchestration and Asciinema is a perfect solution to introduce its features and use cases (https://asciinema.org/~kontena).

Asciinema

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