Asciinema 1.2.0 Is Probably The Most Awesome Software For Sharing Terminal Sessions

As you may know, Asciinema is a free and open-source software used for recording and sharing terminal sessions. The main advantage of the software is that it loads the recording to the Asciinema website, permitting the users to easily share and exchange screencasts.

Because it runs in the terminal, you can copy commands from inside Asciinema and paste them in other shells or terminals, instead of transcribing them by hand.

The latest version available is Asciinema 1.2.0, which has been recently released, bringing the below changes:

• Added playback from stdin: cat demo.json | asciinema play –
• Added playback from IPFS: asciinema play asciinema play ipfs:/ipfs/QmcdXYJp6e4zNuimuGeWPwNMHQdxuqWmKx7NhZofQ1nw2V
• Added playback from asciicast page URL: asciinema play https://asciinema.org/a/22124 -q/–quiet option added to rec command
• Fixed handling of partial UTF-8 sequences in recorded stdout
• Final “exit” is now removed from recorded stdout
• Longer operations like uploading/downloading show “spinner”

Installation instructions:

To install Asciinema on Ubuntu, you have to add the PPA to your system, update the local repository index and install the asciinema package:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zanchey/asciinema
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install asciinema

Optional, to remove asciinema, do:

$ sudo apt-get remove asciinema

The installation instructions should work on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.x, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and other Ubuntu derivative systems.

For Arch Linux, Manjaro and Arch-based systems, the software is available via AUR:

$ sudo yaourt -S asciinema

Optional, to remove asciinema, do:

$ sudo yaourt -Rsn notepadqq

Some usage instructions:

To start the recording, paste the following in the terminal:

$ asciinema rec

To stop, press Ctrl+D or type exit:

$ exit

After the recording is done, you will be given a link to view your videocast. For assigning the video to your asciinema profile, type:

$ asciinema auth

For more usage instructions, see the project’s GitHub page.