Mister Muffin Blog

TL;DR: http://mister-muffin.de/scriptreplay/

Using terminal applications instead of GUI applications has the definitive speed advantage of not having to spend some time on moving a cursor to a 2D coordinate on the screen but instead just doing a 2mm downward motion with one or two fingers. I wonder if something other than terminal applications will allow me to interact with my computer faster until the invention of direct neural interfaces.

I really like terminal applications - not only because of the speed advantage but also because they offer much more real-estate in terms of usable screen space as they dont waste space on stuff like buttons, menu bars or all those pixels wasted on separators and the space between UI elements. Starting to use the pentadactyl firefox extension was not only a huge browsing speed improvement for me but I could also finally use my whole frickin 1920x1080 pixels for viewing the website (well except for a 19 pixels status bar at the bottom).

Now lets finally come to the topic of this post: scriptreplay in javascript.

script(1) and scriptreplay(1), being part of the bsdutils package in debian/ubuntu and the util-linux package in rpm based distribution will probably also already be installed on your system and is one of those really handy tools you did not know of before even though they were always there.

script is a program that you can use to capture a terminal session or console application output whereas scriptreplay is able to replay that session by using a timing file that script is able to output on stderr. Without the timings file, the typescript will include all terminal interaction and is readily readable with a text editor or printable or easily uploadable to a pastebin (no more selecting parts of your terminal window with your mouse and copy-pasting that into the browser). Without the timing file it is useful to document a process - for example if you want to show others how a bug happened on your system or for a homework submission you have to hand in.

A very powerful feature is the mentioned timingfile you can capture by redirecting the stderr output of script into a file. With the use of scriptreplay you can then watch your terminal interaction in real time.

While it would be kinda tedious to share your typescript and timingfile over a pastebin so that a party would have to download those manually and use scriptreplay to watch them, I imagined a kind of youtube for terminal sessions. This would also solve the problem of all those youtube videos that are screen captures of terminal windows - needlessly encoding text as moving images and by that not only destroying the ability to copy&paste things but also needlessly increasing the filesize.

I remembered having seen such a website years ago but dont manage to find it again. To show a proof of concept I prepared the following website:

http://mister-muffin.de/scriptreplay/

I will probably never have the time to make a real webservice out of it but maybe something of this is useful for others.