Tag Archives: Shell

Displaying Your Terminal Sessions

We are used to terminal sessions displayed like any other content, i.e. as a video of some kind. The latter comes with two caveats, though. It uses a lot of bandwidth (compared to the actual terminal session) and is often difficult to read. Because many people do not bother to magnify the terminal either during the actual presentation or as part of the post-processing.

A very interesting alternative, especially for blog posts, is asciinema. It works on Linux, macOS and various BSD flavors. What it basically does is open a special shell (Bash-like) that simply records all keystrokes (plus the responses) in a VT-100 compatible format. So you end up with a small text file that can be replayed using a JavaScript snippet.

In addition to using the hosted instance, that supports sharing in multiple ways, you can also run your own server via Docker. For all the details, please go to the website.