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Brandon Rozek
Brandon Rozek

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Term To SVG

With termtosvg made by Nicolas Bedo we can make SVG animations from terminal output in the style of asciinema. To install use pipx.

pipx install termtosvg
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To start recording, run the command termtosvg

termtosvg
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It first outputs:

Recording started, enter "exit" command or Control-D to end
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At “exit”, by default it will save the animation to a random filename in the tmp folder.

Rendering ended, SVG animation is /tmp/termtosvg_xmadgf9y.svg
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To control the default save location, pass in a filename after termtosvg

termtosvg /path/to/savefile.svg
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To record only the execution of a particular command, use the flag -c

termtosvg -c neofetch
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I recommend that you resize the terminal window so that the frames generated match the desired width and height. You can instead use the -g flag to pass in a geometry. (“100x30” creates a screen with 100 colums and 30 rows)

Lastly, if you don’t want an animation, you can pass in -s and the result will be a folder of SVG files representing each frame.

termtosvg -s
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Here is an example of an animation I made with this tool:

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