shell-keystroke-animator in action

shell-keystroke-animator

Simulate stroking keyboard keys into another application/window while taking screenshots to create a .gif animation.

Create repeatable, editable, automatable example usage of:

  • Terminal/shell programs.
  • Code snippets.
  • Proof-of-concept for hacks.
  • Other text input.

Installation

On Mac with Homebrew:

brew tap joelpurra/joelpurra
brew install shell-keystroke-animator

On other systems:

Clone or download, then either use shell-keystroke-animator/src/keystroke-animator directly where you put it, or symlink keystroke-animator. Required bash 4+ and ImageMagick. Note that shell-keystroke-animator is not expected to work on anything but Mac OS X, without modifications.

Examples

shell-keystroke-animator Google search demo

shell-keystroke-animator Terminal demo

jqnpm in action

shell-keystroke-animator TextEdit demo, with a shadow

shell-keystroke-animator TextEdit demo, without a shadow

npshell in action

Usage

Quickly focus another application/window, where you want your keystrokes to go and animation be created from, as soon as you’ve started keystroke-animator.

Running the software creates a series of .png images, and an output.gif in the same folder you started it from ($PWD).

cat "my-keys.txt" | keystroke-animator [--no-shadow] [countdown [keysleep [linesleep [endsleep]]]]
  • my-keys.txt Sequence of keys/characters to read from stdin and then “type”, one by one.
  • --no-shadow Turn off application window shadows (optional). Useful if the background of the window isn’t white.
  • countdown Pre-script countdown, in integer seconds (optional).
  • keysleep Time to sleep between keys, in seconds (optional).
  • linesleep Time to sleep between lines, in seconds (optional).
  • endsleep Time to sleep at the end of the animation, in seconds (optional).

Limitations

  • Doesn’t work great with Terminal commands which take longer than linesleep to execute fully.
  • The software isn’t designed to handle special characters. Only linebreaks (\n) are treated differently, and is sent as the ↵ (return) key.
  • Tested on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite - please add support for any other platforms you like!

Kudos

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Joel Purra https://joelpurra.com/ All rights reserved.

When using shell-keystroke-animator, comply to the MIT license. Please see the LICENSE file for details.