clif

Cross-platform CLI GIF maker based on JS+Web.

Getting started

On OS X, install latest Xcode command line tools, even if you think you already have them:

xcode-select --install

Then, go through the Apple dialogue to download and install them. Now, you’re ready to install Surge’s version of clif with:

npm install -g @surge/clif

Note, you’ll need to be running [email protected] or greater to do this. You can check what version you’re using with:

npm --version

…and upgrade with:

sudo npm install -g npm

You can omit sudo if you are using Windows.

How to use

Run

clif out.gif

type exit to finish and save the recording.

Features

• Easy to install: npm install -g clif.
• Works on OSX and Linux.
• Small GIFs.
• High quality (anti-aliased fonts).
• Rendered with CSS/JS, customizable.
• Realtime parallel rendering.
• Frame aggregation and customizable FPS.
• Support for titles Terminal.app-style.

How it works

clif builds mainly on four projects: child_pty, term.js omggif and phantomjs.

child_pty is used to spawn a pseudo terminal from which we can capture the entirety of input and output.

Each frame that's captured is asynchronously sent to a phantomjs headless browser to render using term.js and screenshot.

The GIF is composited with omggif and finally written out to the filesystem.

Options

  Usage: clif [options] <outfile>

  Options:

    -h, --help           output usage information
    -V, --version        output the version number
    -c, --cols <cols>    Cols of the term [90]
    -r, --rows <rows>    Rows of the term [30]
    -s, --shell <shell>  Shell to use [/bin/bash]
    -f, --fps <fps>      Frames per second [8]
    -q, --quality <q>    Frame quality 1-30 (1 = best|slowest) [5]

Contributing

You can edit the styles in lib/client.js and the recompiling:

npm run compile

TODO

• Substitute phantom with a terminal rendered on top of node-canvas or low-level graphic APIs. terminal.js seems like a good candidate to add a <canvas> adaptor to.
• Should work on Windows with some minor tweaks.
• There's an issue with Node 0.12 and IO.js on Mac where stdout sometimes buffers for no reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Credits

• Inspired by KeyboardFire's mkcast.
• Borrows GIF palette neuquant indexing from sole's animated_GIF.js.

License

MIT