Advantages over asciinema + svg-term?

[transitive-bullshit]

First off, this project looks really solid. Just curious if there are any differences or advantages over using this program versus asciinema + svg-term-cli?

I've used this approach in the past very successfully and have found that most people don't even know what "animated svg" really means. I also wrote about it here.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the two approaches & thanks again for this project!

[nbedos]

I remember reading your article when pondering whether it was worth writing another terminal recorder!
I tried svg-term-cli at some point but I thought the quality of some animations was sub-par. It might just be noticeable on my machine but when I look at [1]:

• the cursor partly covers the character on the left
• when the cursor reaches the bottom line of the screen, the line moves up and down by one pixel each time a character is entered.

Also, I don't know JavaScript and I'd rather have a tool written in Python that I can understand and easily fix. Better yet, a tool that can do the recording on its own!

[1] https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli/blob/master/examples/chest.svg

[shelldandy]

Can you add terminal borders/padding like on the example you showed??

[transitive-bullshit]

Sounds good @nbedos -- thanks for the detailed reply!

I agree with @shelldandy that adding optional terminal UX would be a great feature to add :)

[gepandz]

The biggest advantage I see in this over asciinema is that this appears to be rendering locally, as opposed to sending things up to asciinema's servers. The latter gives my IT Security folks hives. This way, I get the benefits of terminal animations without risking my job. Win! ;-)

[shelldandy]

You can use asciinema without uploading to their servers with the --raw option then piping the result to svg-term-cli

https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema#rec-filename

There's also the cat version which i think would do the same:

https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema#cat-filename

Even more info:

https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema#hosting-the-recordings-on-the-web

[nbedos]

@transitive-bullshit @shelldandy I like the idea of adding terminal UX. How can this be made easily configurable? Provide a few sample SVG images in $HOME/.config/termtosvg/ux that be referenced to in the configuration file or on the command line? Users could also modify them or add their own (SVG) images in the folder and use them.

Implementation probably won't be easy though. I'm currently using svgwrite for writing SVG animations. I recently discovered it cannot be used to read SVG files, so I probably would have to switch to something else like lxml.

[transitive-bullshit]

Hmmm, svg-term seems to be rendering the UX via SSR react. Not sure how much that helps you, but in general I've been very happy with their output.

[marionebl]

Hey @nbedos,

great work on termtosvg, I think it is amazing that there now is more than one solution for this! ❤️

I tried svg-term-cli at some point but I thought the quality of some animations was sub-par. It might > just be noticeable on my machine but when I look at [1]:

• the cursor partly covers the character on the left
• when the cursor reaches the bottom line of the screen, the line moves up and down by one pixel each time a character is entered.

I'll have a look at those issue sometime next week, comparing termtosvg to svg-term-cli output just might do the trick.

[marionebl]

The biggest advantage I see in this over asciinema is that this appears to be rendering locally, as opposed to sending things up to asciinema's servers. The latter gives my IT Security folks hives. This way, I get the benefits of terminal animations without risking my job. Win! ;-)

@gepandz Apart from the plumbing commands @shelldandy suggested, svg-term also supports a --cmd flag, which opens an asciinema subshell and then process the resulting cast. That cast (or the contents of the asciinema subshell) never leave your machine, so no reason to make your ITSec people nervous 😄