termtosvg

A Linux terminal recorder written in Python which renders your command line sessions as standalone SVG animations.

More examples of recordings here

Motivation

I really like the clean look of SVG animations and I also wanted to see how this solution would hold out against other attempts at terminal recording such as asciinema.

Installation

termtosvg is compatible with Python >= 3.5 and can be installed with pip:

pip install termtosvg

Usage

Basic usage

Start recording with:

$ termtosvg
Recording started, enter "exit" command or Control-D to end

You are now in a subshell where you can type your commands as usual. Once you are done, exit the shell to end the recording:

$ exit
Recording ended, file is /tmp/termtosvg_exp5nsr4.svg

Finally, use your favorite image viewer to play the animation:

$ xdg-open /tmp/termtosvg_exp5nsr4.svg

Subcommands

Rendering the SVG animation while recording might sometimes slow the commands being executed a bit because of the CPU usage, so it is possible to proceed in two steps:

Record the terminal session to disk in asciicast v2 format
Render the SVG animation using the recording on disk

The usage of these two commands is detailed below.

Record

$ termtosvg record --help
usage: termtosvg record [output_file] [--verbose] [--help]

record the session to a file in asciicast v2 format

positional arguments:
  output_file    optional filename for the recording; if missing, a random
                 filename will be automatically generated

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose  increase log messages verbosity

Render

$ termtosvg render --help
usage: termtosvg render input_file [output_file] [--theme THEME] [--verbose] [--help]

render an asciicast recording as an SVG animation

positional arguments:
  input_file     recording of the terminal session in asciicast v2 format
  output_file    optional filename for the SVG animation; if missing, a random
                 filename will be automatically generated

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --theme THEME  color theme used to render the terminal session (circus,
                 classic-dark, classic-light, dracula, isotope, marrakesh,
                 material, monokai, solarized-dark, solarized-light, zenburn)
  -v, --verbose  increase log messages verbosity

Color themes

Default themes

If you wish to record a terminal session using a specific color theme, say monokai for example, enter the following command:

termtosvg --theme monokai

Available themes can be listed with termtosvg --help

...
  --theme THEME  color theme used to render the terminal session (circus,
                 classic-dark, classic-light, dracula, isotope, marrakesh,
                 material, monokai, solarized-dark, solarized-light, zenburn)
...

Custom themes

If termtosvg is called without the --theme option, it will try gathering color information from the Xserver running on your machine.

To tell the Xserver about the color theme you wish to use for termtosvg, you have to declare the foreground, background and default 16 colors in your ~/.Xresources file. Here is an example based on monokai from the base16 project:

termtosvg.foreground: #f8f8f2
termtosvg.background: #272822
termtosvg.color0: #272822
termtosvg.color1: #f92672
termtosvg.color2: #a6e22e
termtosvg.color3: #f4bf75
termtosvg.color4: #66d9ef
termtosvg.color5: #ae81ff
termtosvg.color6: #a1efe4
termtosvg.color7: #f8f8f2
termtosvg.color8: #75715e
termtosvg.color9: #fd971f
termtosvg.color10: #383830
termtosvg.color11: #49483e
termtosvg.color12: #a59f85
termtosvg.color13: #f5f4f1
termtosvg.color14: #cc6633
termtosvg.color15: #f9f8f5

Once you have added this information to your ~/.Xresources file, load it with xrdb or restart the Xserver on your machine. You should now be able to record terminal sessions with those custom colors.

Dependencies

termtosvg uses:

pyte to render the terminal screen
svgwrite to create SVG animations
python-xlib to query the X server for color configuration and to parse Xresources data
base16-xresources for default color themes

ylmrx/termtosvg