In this tutorial you’ll learn how to record anything you do on terminal as an animated gif file. To achieve this, we’ll be using two softwares ttyrec and ttygif.

ttyrec will only record the terminal screen, while ttygif will convert the recorded file to a gif file.

Let’s start with installation

The following commands will install ttyrec and ttygif on arch linux. While you can use any aur package manager you want, we recommend trizen.

Install ttyrec

trizen -S ttyrec

Install ttygif

trizen -S ttyrec

Recording Terminal

ttyrec myrecord

To start recording the terminal screen you need to type ‘ttyrec myrecord’ and recording will start automatically, myrecord is the name of the recorded file that will be created on the same location as ttyrec. Once you’re done with recording press ctrl+d to exit.

To save the recorded file to another location you need to type ‘ttyrec’ and to specify the full path where the recorded file will be saved.

ttyrec /home/ebblr/Desktop/myrecord

Creating GIF

ttygif myrecord

To convert the recorded file to gif, you need to type ttygif and the name of recorded file, and the process will start.

DEMO GIF