How to record your terminal session and export it as animated GIF

In this article i will show you how you can record your terminal output and export it as an animated GIF, why to do that? there are multiple reasons! to create tutorials, or to share complicated terminal output where just pasting the output would not be enough!, lets see how it works

Installing Terminalizer

The application we will use to do this task is called terminalizer, its a node.js application, this means that we need to install node.js in our system if is not installed, on Mac to do this we use brew but would be somehow similar in ubuntu by using apt

$ brew install node.js

Next we need to install yarn , i dont know much about node.js but i think yarn is for node.js what pip is for Python!

$ brew install yarn

Finnaly to install terminalizer we enter

$ yarn global add terminalizer

Recording a terminal session

To record a terminal session is super easy! we need just to start terminalizer

$ terminalizer record <record_name>

Lets start a recording and name it demo01, to exit terminalizer we need to press CTRL-D

$ terminalizer record demo01 
The recording session is started 
Press CTRL+D to exit and save the recording

Now we can start working on the commands that we want to record, like normally would do, in my case i just entered the ls -ltrh command, and then pressed CTRLD+D, terminalizer asked me if i would like to share my recording on their site.

ls -ltrh 
total 8 
drwxr-xr-x+   4 kpatronas  staff   128B Aug 12  2023 Public 
drwx------+   6 kpatronas  staff   192B Oct  3  2023 Pictures 
drwx------+   5 kpatronas  staff   160B Dec  1  2023 Music 
drwx------    5 kpatronas  staff   160B May  5 17:15 Movies 
drwx------@   5 kpatronas  staff   160B May 31 20:09 Applications 
drwx------@ 109 kpatronas  staff   3.4K Jun 23 17:11 Library 
drwx------+   4 kpatronas  staff   128B Jul  5 21:12 Desktop 
drwx------@  15 kpatronas  staff   480B Aug 24 20:49 Documents 
drwx------@   4 kpatronas  staff   128B Aug 28 23:11 Downloads 
drwxr-xr-x    5 kpatronas  staff   160B Aug 28 23:11 go 
-rw-r--r--    1 kpatronas  staff   2.4K Sep  2 02:08 config.yml 
 ~                                                         ✔ ╱ 02:08:36 
Successfully Recorded 
The recording data is saved into the file: 
/Users/kpatronas/demo01.yml 
You can edit the file and even change the configurations. 
The command `terminalizer share`can be used anytime to share recordings! 
? Would you like to share your recording on www.terminalizer.com? No

Now to export the recording to GIF we need to enter the following command

$ terminalizer render demo01 
Rendering frame 17/17 100% [==============================] 0.0s 
[render] Process successfully completed in 3102ms. 
Merging frame 17/17 100% [==============================] 0.0s 
[merge] Process successfully completed in 46651ms. 
 
Successfully Rendered 
The animated GIF image is saved into the file: 
/Users/kpatronas/render1725232562902.gif

Inspecting the output

Opening the GIF from a web browser generated the following result! isnt that cool!? :)

Conclusion

Terminalizer can be used in cases you need to record the input and output of the terminal, this could be sharing a tutorial or command output that is very complex to just copy and paste! i hope you enjoyed this article!