A standalone terminal recorder forked from chjj/ttystudio. See there for font setup information.
Differences from forked project
My changes are opinionated and therefore not for everybody. Try this out and use the original project if you like that experience better.
A key difference in the two approaches is that ttystudio records
in real-time and toughtty records changes. toughtty also
normalizes typing speeds. This means that if you pause to think
about what to type while recording, toughtty won't capture frames
until you actually type. Once the frames are written to a GIF, you
will always look to be typing at the same speed with minimal frames.
Installation
npm i -g toughtty
If installation fails with EACCES, try:
npm cache clean && npm i -g --unsafe-perm toughtty
Usage
$ sudo npm install -g toughtty
$ toughtty record frames.json
# C-t to toggle recording
# C-b to insert a pause
# C-c to end the session
# GIF with 100ms delay between frames
$ toughtty encode --delay 100 frames.json session.gif
Managing recording
toughtty does not start recording immediately so you can set PS1
or do other terminal setup. When you are ready, hit the recording
toggle key (default: C-t) to start recording. Hit it again to stop
recording. You may start and stop recording freely, but the recording
session does not end until you hit C-c.
Since toughtty does not record in real time, it does not know when you
wish to pause, or for how long. When you hit the pause hotkey
(default: C-b), toughtty will add padding frames.
You can control the number of padding frames.
$ toughtty record --padding 20 frames.json
... > <C-t> echo "Hello, World!"
... > "Hello, World!"
... > <C-b>
... > <C-c>
$ toughtty encode --delay 100 frames.json session.gif
In this session, the user starts capturing changes with C-t,
echoes Hello, World! and then hits C-b to add a pause of
20 frames due to --padding.
When you later write a GIF using toughtty encode --delay 100,
this results in a GIF with 100ms between frames. Therefore those
20 frames result in a 2 second pause (20 frames * 100ms = 2000ms = 2s).
--padding defaults to 1, but you should know in advance the delay
between frames in your intended GIF and set --padding such that it's
easy to control the length of pauses when you run different commands
during your recording session.
Result comparison
Here are two GIFs showing the same session. The first is by ttystudio,
the second is by toughtty.
ttystudio |
toughtty |
|---|---|
| 84 frames | 38 frames |
| 3805 bytes | 2980 bytes |