asciinema (aka asciinema CLI or asciinema recorder) is a command-line tool for recording terminal sessions.

Unlike typical screen recording software, which records visual output of a screen into a heavyweight video files (.mp4, .mov), asciinema recorder runs inside a terminal, capturing terminal session output into a lightweight recording files in the asciicast format (.cast).

The recordings can be replayed in a terminal, embedded on a web page with the asciinema player, or published to an asciinema server, such as asciinema.org, for further sharing.

Notable features:

• recording and replaying of sessions inside a terminal,
• light-weight recording format, which is highly compressible (down to 15% of the original size e.g. with zstd or gzip),
• integration with asciinema server, e.g. asciinema.org, for easy recording hosting.

Recording is as easy as running this command in your shell:

asciinema rec demo.cast

Check out the Getting started guide for installation and usage overview.

This branch (main) tracks the previous generation of the asciinema CLI, written in Python. This codebase is now in maintenance mode, and no more features will be added to it. All effort goes into the upcoming 3.0 (develop branch), which is a complete rewrite in Rust.

Sustainability of asciinema development relies on donations and sponsorships.

Please help the software project you use and love. Become a supporter or a corporate sponsor.

asciinema is sponsored by:

• Brightbox

If you're interested in integration or customization of asciinema to suit your needs, check asciinema consulting services.

© 2011 Marcin Kulik.

All code is licensed under the GPL, v3 or later. See LICENSE file for details.