Combining Emacs and Asciinema

  • 3 Jan 2024
  • One-minute read

This shows how to record an Emacs demo using Asciinema.

Asciinema [as-kee-nuh-muh] is a free and open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web.

However

That is not as easy as it looks.

emacs special keys

Most terminals don't know about Meta or Ctrl, so I run

 xterm -fa 'Monospace' -fs 12

because unlike Gnome-terminal, Xterm recognises the Ctrl Key. And for meta, I temporarily switch to using the ESC key.

I then run Asciinema and emacsclient to connect to the running Emacs.

 asciinema rec -c "emacsclient -nw" -i 2 -t "Emacs Recording" \
 /tmp/emacs-session.cast

This command creates a local file, it does not upload it to the public asciinema server. You can replay it:

 asciinema play /tmp/emacs-session.cast
emacs