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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Great gif. This should be how everyone does readmes.

An 18 MB GIF of some text? No. It's an unfortunate consequence of GitHub still not allowing actual video files.

I might not have realized it was an animation if you hadn't said this. It takes forever to load.

If there were only a way to render text in such a way that when clicked would instruct your browser to request and display a resource from another site. :-)

I’m conflicted. When the video is so long that waiting for it to restart is painful, I think that an actual video with pause/play/seek controls is preferred. At the same time, it’s nice that it autoplays. For 100% text/CLI videos, I prefer Asciinema as it doesn’t involve downloading an 18MB GIF.

Indeed, I'd love GitHub to support video embed in the readme, but having to go to another page to see the video is a bit of a no-no for me...

On twitter I did use a video instead of a gif: https://twitter.com/MathieuDutour/status/1134448154793914368

Maybe a short GIF and a longer full video? I don’t know. This is all super off-topic anyway. I like the project very much.

Alternate POV: I hate gifs in readmes precisely because of the autoplays. I find it incredibly difficult to read a block of text when there's a gif moving around directly above/below it.

I've tried doing this screen-capture-to-gif thing before but it was always frustrating. I'd love to hear about the workflow to make a gif like this.

ShareX makes it very easy.

https://getsharex.com/

Wow I never heard of this and it looks awesome! Thanks for the share!

I've used the default MacOS screen recording (cmd + shift + 5) and then edited/speed up some parts with iMovie.

Then I transform the video into a gif using https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mo...

Hope that helps!

I used to do the same, but I've had MacOS's default software crash with long-ish (about an hour) content. I switch to Open Broadcaster Software[1] after that; free and open source, and very well made. The learning curve isn't that steep, either, if you're just doing regular screen/audio capture.

[1]

For terminal based things I've been using `asciinema`. There are various options to play/render such recordings, such as to an interactive SVG. SVGs are lot smaller than GIFs in file size, and are even scalable.

See one of my projects for example: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend#ffsend-wip

Even better is ttyrec + tty-player for full self-hosting without a third party intervening. You get interactive playback controls and scroll buffer access while paused.

https://github.com/chris-morgan/tty-player

That isn't something I can embed in a GitHub README. But it looks cool anyway.

If you're doing just text/terminal recording, Asciinema is probably your best option: https://asciinema.org/

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