2023-11-15 - Magical Terminal Recording Software
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I can't believe I've never heard of this before. There's a wonderful looking bit of software out there called asciinema. It records terminal sessions and output as if it were a video capture, but it is TEXT. Beautiful, readable, infinitely useful text that you can actually highight and copy if desired. It's seriously wonderful to people like me who quite obviously prefer text-based interactions with my computer.
I see a lot of potential for this. I've been aiming to make technical education content and have been trying to figure out the presentation aspect of it. I've wanted something fairly simple to read, distraction-free, and within an intuitive environment. Too many times I've seen really distracting and frankly annoying content creators fumble around a terrible Windows GUI to try and show a technical concept; the effect of that for people like me is annoyance and distrust for the expertise of the individual. Not saying I'm any better; anyone who's seen me use Windows would heavily agree.
With asciinema, I think I can achieve what I'm aiming at. It's extremely simple, it plays well, it's trim-able before recording-- I figure with some clever techniques, I can present technical concepts very simply and effectively, and even give commentary within the recordings. Animating ASCII isn't the hardest thing in the world. If I could make the videos playable from one's local terminal, too, whether by "streaming" it there via some command or allowing someone to download the recording, that would be next level. That's exactly what I want to create: a command line-available technical reference system.
I may try it out on this website or another. We'll see.