Record Your Command Line Sessions with Asciinema

If you’ve ever looked up how-to videos on YouTube then you’re familiar with the poor quality of those videos out there. Sometimes you’ll find videos recording the whole screen with tiny CLI windows, other times the CLI is just too blurry to read.

With asciinema you can automatically record all your terminal sessions with 100% zoom and save the videos locally.

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Need to teach someone how to perform a certain task? No problem. Wanna release your own how-to vids on YouTube? Piece of cake. Thanks to asciinema’s recorder.

The project works like an installable applet where you can download the files or install them dynamically using Homebrew. Note this only works on OS X, Linux, and BSD so it’s not compliant with the Windows CLI.

The recording feature runs on a series of keyboard shortcuts to stop and save a recording. While you’re inside the terminal just enter asciinema rec and you’ll call the recording function immediately.

Do your thing, record what you need, then CMD + D to stop recording. It’s super easy to use and if you’re already comfortable with the command line you should have no trouble with this recorder.

Videos are actually hosted on the asciinema website so you can browse through a library of previously-recorded videos to see what’s out there. It’s also a great way to share your clips with others and embed them into your site.

But you can also download your videos and re-upload them to popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.

To get this running check out their documentation page and follow the instructions.

You can also dig into the docs to find common commands, everyday usage for recording, and properties for your own asciinema config file.

Terminal lovers around the world rejoice! This is one of the best CLI recording tools on the web and you can install it for free with one command.

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