
Asciinema - jmduke
https://asciinema.org/
======
tobbyb
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](http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/index.html.en)
[2][http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/ttyrec.1.h...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man1/ttyrec.1.html)

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

~~~
chrismorgan
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>.

~~~
chrismorgan
And here it is: [http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info/](http://tty-
player.chrismorgan.info/) and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763062).

~~~
scott_karana
Looks like your link was somehow submitted with a null title: your thread
appears broken to me. :)

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

"curl -sL [https://asciinema.org/install](https://asciinema.org/install) | sh"

Still a cool product!

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

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

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
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.

~~~
joefreeman
Would this be better if the pasted command included some checksum which was
checked before piping into the `sh`? Can anyone who's better at bash than me
give an example of how this could work in a relatively cross-platform way?

~~~
nitrogen
You would need to have a GPG signature with a well-known public key that is
verified before executing the code.

~~~
joefreeman
Sorry, can you explain why? If the checksum is provided (as part of the sh
snippet) by the website with the SSL certificate, isn't that enough
reassurance?

~~~
myhf
If the snippet and the download are on the same site, then whoever controls
that site at the moment can provide an accurate checksum of whatever malware
they want to host. A signature is an improvement because it can give you some
confidence that the current controller is the same as the original controller.

------
chrismorgan
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](https://github.com/chjj/term.js)).

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

------
technologia
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.

------
steckerbrett
Previously: [http://showterm.io/](http://showterm.io/)

~~~
delinka
Are these related?

~~~
cormacrelf
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.

~~~
delinka
When I see "previously" on HN, I tend to think "this was previously posted to
HN." In this case, I thought the poster was indicating that asciinema.org was
previously showterm.io - neither is the case.

~~~
sickill
asciinema was initially called ascii.io. It got renamed about 2 years ago.

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

~~~
_jomo
Here you go:
[https://asciinema.org/a/6heuukhda9ozykt72gkw5fkog](https://asciinema.org/a/6heuukhda9ozykt72gkw5fkog)
:)

~~~
modfodder
Now that is what I was hoping for.

------
mpu
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
Code is open source, install it
[https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org](https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.org)

Link is in the FAQ.

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

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
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 ;).

~~~
miles
_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](http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html)

------
axus
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](http://mkv25.net/dfma/browsemovies.php)

Dwarf Fortress records the game to CMV format:
[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Jifodus/CMV_file...](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Jifodus/CMV_file_format)

------
pareshverma91
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.

~~~
cooper12
Yeah maybe a button to "View Transcript"

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

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

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

~~~
Ambroos
With an account your recordings are private by default.

------
steinnes
I quite like this service, used it a couple of months ago
([http://steinn.org/post/brute-force-still-going-
strong/](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 :-)

------
Merovius
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.

------
nyir
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.

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

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

------
nevalau
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](https://asciinema.org/~kontena)).

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

~~~
cooper12
Just curious, what benefit would this have over something like git? Just to
show your programming process?

~~~
mrschwabe
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.

------
pixelbeat
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](http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh)

------
NotHereNotThere
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.

------
swader
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](http://showterm.io/a0616ce5e6f411f292e18)
taken from [http://www.bitfalls.com/2013/08/autofight-php-job-
interview-...](http://www.bitfalls.com/2013/08/autofight-php-job-interview-
task-part-3.html)

~~~
sickill
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/...](https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-
player/blob/next/src/cljs/asciinema_player/view.cljs#L145-L160)

As for the playback speed you can set speed, theme, font size etc (embedding
docs say this -
[https://asciinema.org/docs/embedding](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](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!

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

------
oadam
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.

------
nichochar
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

~~~
sickill
Yeah, see here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9755166)

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

------
dpacmittal
How does it work?

~~~
biot
[https://asciinema.org/docs/how-it-works](https://asciinema.org/docs/how-it-
works)

------
tacone
Impressive.

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

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

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

~~~
vonklaus
Oh that makes sense, as it is quite close in spelling. I have been reading as
(As-Key-Nema).

~~~
sickill
You were reading it right :) I guess I should add spelling info to the site ;)

