Record and Share your Terminal Sessions with asciinema

Often we need to share what's happening in our terminal, whether for a tutorial, demonstrating a bug, or simply documenting a process. While traditional video recording tools exist, asciinema offers a much more powerful and lightweight alternative.

What is asciinema?¶

asciinema doesn't record video in the traditional sense (pixels). Instead, it captures the terminal's text stream along with exact timings. This has several advantages:

• Tiny files: Instead of megabytes of video, you get very small text files.
• Selectable text: When playing back a session on the web, you can copy and paste the code directly.
• Perfect quality: No loss of resolution or compression artifacts.

Installation and Help¶

I already have asciinema installed on my system. Here you can see the summary of available commands:## Interactive example

Below you can see a small demonstration of asciinema in action, running the command cowsay Muuuuu:

Basic commands¶

To start recording, simply run:

asciinema rec demo.cast

This will begin recording everything that happens in your current terminal session. When you're finished, simply press Ctrl-D or type exit. The result will be saved in the demo.cast file.

To play it back locally:

asciinema play demo.cast

And if you want to share it with the world, you can upload it to their free hosting service:

asciinema upload demo.cast

Why use it?¶

It's ideal for developers writing technical blogs (like this one), as it allows you to embed the recordings directly into the browser with a lightweight JavaScript-based player. Goodbye, blurry 20MB GIFs!