Record to a GIF ?

[bradparks]

I'd like to record an asciimatics animation to a gif, at the command line.

Any suggestions on how to do this? Thanks!

[peterbrittain]

I've not needed that as I use asciinema. However, a quick google online shows a couple of candidates

https://github.com/chjj/ttystudio https://github.com/icholy/ttygif

Take your pick!

[peterbrittain]

I'll leave this open for a bit in case the community has a better suggestion....

[bradparks]

Hey... thanks for the suggestions.. I'd tried ttygif but didnt get it to work, but ttystudio led me to a fork of it, toughtty that allows you to control when the recording starts, which works great for staring the recording manually.

My use case is generating fun gifs to paste into Slack that are branded with lol animations and text ;-) So I don't want anyone to actually see it was a terminal window at all, just a retro looking animation that I made super fast!

So in summary:

• get your animation ready to record
• start the recorder, toughtty by running $ toughtty record out.json
• start your animation. Note that recording hasn't started yet.
• once your animation is running, press Ctrl+T to start recording
• when you think it's good, press Ctr+C to stop the recording
• generate your gif by running toughtty encode --delay 100 out.json test.gif
• open the test.gif in your browser to view the animation!

I found toughtty by browsing the active forks of ttystudio https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html#chjj/ttystudio

and then installed it under node v8

Example: https://imgur.com/a/0Su6pI6

[peterbrittain]

Nice.