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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I was intrigued to see how the demo GIF in the README was generated: https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63...

Turns out it's using another project by the same author: https://github.com/tamnd/ascii-gif

The script used for the demo is at https://github.com/tamnd/kage/blob/01e75b87ecc893bbba7943c63... and has a comment showing how to run it:

  ascii-gif render docs/demo/kage.tape -o docs/static/demo.gif

Looks like it's an opinionated wrapper around https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

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You can also do an animated svg which is way smaller than a gif because it's just text keyframes (https://github.com/vytskalt/pseudoc/blob/main/assets/factori...)

Very cool, never thought of that! "way smaller" is almost an understatement, when it's 50kb :P Neat that it loads in GitHub READMEs as well, which is probably a large reason people use .gif today.

How can you do it? I don't see an SVG output from ascii-gif.

it might be this: https://github.com/mrmarble/termsvg

I used a different project, https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli

Have you heard the good news about the terminal savior asciinema -- https://asciinema.org/

It's a cool tool/platform, but very different. Asciinema tries to make the "multimedia" itself better by making it actual text instead of being video/images, while the CLI command above turns actual text into multimedia supported by platforms already. Both are useful, both have their use cases :)

FYI, on other platforms (Windows/MacOS), LiceCAP is a fantastic tool to record screen into compact GIFs by the author of Winamp and Reaper DAW:

https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

I have a bunch of opinionated/personal-use binaries like this in my $HOME/bin/, like delete-all-npm, clean-rust-cache, download-youtube-playlist, and get-markdown <url>. It feels good, and I don't need to remember any commands. Sometimes my coding agent can figure out how to call some of those tools too ;))

VHS is fantastic for scripting cli video generation.

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