Blazingly fast terminal recorder that generates animated gif images for the web written in rust for MacOS.

Demo

Features

• Screenshotting your terminal with 4 frames per second (every 250ms)
• Generates high quality small sized animated gif images
• Build-In idle frames detection and optimization (for super fluid presentations)
• Runs (only) on MacOS
• Uses native efficient APIs
• Runs without any cloud service and entirely offline
• No issues with terminal sizes larger than 80x24
• No issues with fonts or colors
• No issues with curses based programs
• No issues with escape sequences
• No record and replay - just one simple command to rule them all
• Hidden feature: Record every window you want
• Written in Rust 🦀

Install

NOTE for now t-rec depends on imagemagick, but this is going to change soon.

❯ brew install imagemagick
❯ cargo install -f t-rec 

Hidden Gems

You can record not only the terminal but also every other window. There 2 ways to do so:

1) abuse the env var TERM_PROGRAM like this:

• for example lets record a window 'Google Chrome'
• make sure chrome is running and visible on screen

❯ TERM_PROGRAM="google chrome" t-rec
Frame cache dir: "/var/folders/m8/084p1v0x4770rpwpkrgl5b6h0000gn/T/trec-74728.rUxBx3ohGiQ2"
Press Ctrl+D to end recording
Recording Window: "Google Chrome 2"

this is how it looks then:

2) use the env var WINDOWID like this:

• for example let's record a VSCode window
• figure out the window id program, and make it
• make sure the window is visible on screen
• set the variable and run t-rec

❯ t-rec --ls-win | grep -i code
Code | 27600

# set the WINDOWID variable and run t-rec
❯ WINDOWID=27600 t-rec

Frame cache dir: "/var/folders/m8/084p1v0x4770rpwpkrgl5b6h0000gn/T/trec-77862.BMYiHNRWqv9Y"
Press Ctrl+D to end recording

this is how it looks then:

Contribute

Testers on different Apple hardware needed. Also, exotic shell setups are very interesting for testing.

To contribute to t-rec you can either checkout existing issues labeled with good first issue or open a new issue and describe your problem.
Also every PR is welcome. Support for Linux and Windows needs to be done.

License

• GNU GPL v3 license
• Copyright 2020 © Sven Assmann.