Record Your Terminal With Terminalizer

Did you ever want to demo a terminal program or remotely explain a sequence of commands to a friend or colleague? If so, then terminalizer is a tool for you…

Example recording with terminalizer

Installation

While the installation steps described in the docs are not very detailed. When simply followed them, I ended up with errors. It turned out that Node.js 16 is not yet supported. Consequently, I needed to switch to an older version to run this successfully. Consequently, the following sequence of command did the trick.

$ nvm use 14
$ npm install -g terminalizer

Next, as a Mac use with oh-my-zsh, I created and edited a config.yaml to run zsh instead of the default bash in the recoreded terminal to effectively get the themese applied in the recording.

$ terminalizer init
$ vim ~/.terminalizer/config.yaml

Within the config file, set the command from null to zsh.

Because the ZSH_THEME="agnoster" that I usually use has a minor rendering glitch. In the example above, the more simplistic theme ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell" is used instead.

Usage

The commands for basic usage are explained in detailed in its docs. However, the most common commands are the following:

• terminalizer record <name>: Started a recording and saves a <name>.yaml file.
• terminalizer play <name>: Play a recording in the terminal.
• terminalizer render <name>: Renders a GIF using the given recording.

In case you ever end up a warning such as zsh: command not found: terminalizer after installing and using terminalizer successfully, then check your Node version with node -v. At the time of writing, there seem to be troubles with v16.13.1, but no issues with v14.17.0.