Monday, February 17, 2014

Plain text screencast

“How do you install a foobar-quux?”, you hear it from the other side of the desk. “It’s easier to do than to explain”, you respond grabbing your keyboard. A few lines in the terminal and it’s done. You hesitate for a moment to write a neat script of what you’ve just done. But it’s not that easy, because… And it’s not worth it once you’re done. Until you hear the same question again in a week, “How did you install that foobar thing? It looked so easy, but I forgot.”
If you had a really lightweight screencast tool at hand which does nothing fancy, no screen resolution and frame rate settings. Just record what I do in the terminal.
The funny thing is this simple tool exists. It’s pretty old, actually, its first version was released in 2000. The original one is called ttyrec. It has quite some spinoffs. You can even upload it to the web and replay in the browser. I found more sites offering this service
My favorite one is Shelr.tv where you can change the replay speed.

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