Turn R scripts into terminal screencasts
asciicast takes an R script and turns it into an asciinema cast. It can simulate typing, and records all terminal output in real time as it happens.
- Input is an R script, output is a v2 asciicast recording.
- Record all terminal output in real time, as it happens.
- Simulate typing in the commands, with a configurable, randomized speed.
- Alternatively, whole comment blocks or expressions can just appear on the screen.
- Convert casts to SVG images using svg-term. The package comes with its own svg-term bundle, no external dependencies are needed.
- Render a single frame of a cast as an SVG image.
- Configurable delay at the beginning, at the end and between paragraphs.
- HTML widget, to be used in Rmarkdown documents, e.g. in vignettes.
- Read casts from asciinema JSON files (version 2), or from https://asciinema.org directly.
- Special knitr engine to create R markdown files with ascii casts.
See the
asciicast-demo
vignette. - Create ascii casts in GitHub READMEs via animated SVG files. See an
example in
inst/examples
or theREADME.Rmd
source of the README file you are reading.
- asciicast does not work in Windows yet, because of a the lack of a pseudo terminal. Maybe you can try running it on Linux in Docker?
- Recordings are currently real time, so if you “type in” a lot of code/text, that might take a while to record.
- Only syntactically correct R script files can be recorded.
- asciicast redefines
option("error")
currently, so if you want to set this option in your demo, that won’t work.
You can install the released version of asciicast from CRAN:
install.packages("asciicast")
See the inst/examples
directory
for these examples.
The input script:
#' Rows: 10
print("Hello world!")
Input script that uses asciicast itself:
#' Title: asciicast example recorded in asciicast
#' Cols: 80
#' Rows: 40
#' Empty_wait: 3
#' End_wait: 20
# <<
# An example for using asciicast, recorded in asciicast itself!
# First, save the R code you want to run, in a script file.
# The file can contain any code, including interactive code,
# as long as it is a syntactically valid R file.
# Second, perform the recording with the `record()` function.
# We are recording an example file now, that comes with the package.
# <<
src <- system.file("examples", "hello.R", package = "asciicast")
cast <- asciicast::record(src)
# <<
# `cast` is an `asciicast` object, which has some metadata and the
# recording itself:
# <<
cast
# <<
# You can write `cast` to a JSON file that can be played by any
# asciinema player. Or you can write it to an SVG file that can
# be embedded into a web page, or a GitHub README.
# <<
svg <- tempfile(fileext = ".svg")
asciicast::write_svg(cast, svg, window = TRUE)
Input script with errors:
#' Rows: 15
# Demonstrate that errors are handled well
library("not-this-really")
traceback()
1+1
- asciinema: https://asciinema.org/
- The original terminal session recorder: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema
- svg-term: https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term, https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli
MIT @ RStudio