v0.4.0 — Animated demos go light and dark

The dual-theme trick from v0.3.0 — one SVG carrying a light and a dark palette, switched by the viewer's prefers-color-scheme — now works for animated recordings too. One set of frames serves both palettes, so the dual file below costs 22 bytes more than its single-theme twin. If you're reading this in GitHub's dark mode it's already dark; flip your theme and it follows.

Highlights

• Animated dual-theme — --theme-light github-light --theme-dark github-dark now works for .cast inputs and rec sessions, not just stills. Frames are rendered once with palette classes and the colours live in a CSS block per theme, so a dual animation is ~100% the size of a single-theme one instead of double.
• asciicast v3 — recordings from asciinema 3.0 load directly (v2 keeps working). v3 files embed the recording terminal's colours, so -t auto renders a session with the palette of the terminal it was recorded in.
• Trim the replay — --from 12 --to 31 animates just a slice of a recording. The first frame opens on the screen as of --from, so the lead-in is skipped, not fast-forwarded.
• Cursor styles and reduced motion — --cursor <block|bar|underline|none> picks the cursor shape, and every animated SVG now respects prefers-reduced-motion by showing the final frame as a still poster.
• Completions, man page, config file — terminal-svg --completions zsh (and bash/fish/elvish/powershell), a generated man page, and personal defaults in ~/.config/terminal-svg/config.toml — flags always beat the config, and typo'd keys fail loudly instead of silently doing nothing.
• A --help worth reading — flags are grouped into the same sections as the docs (Output & themes, Window, Layout & fonts, Capture, Animation) with human value names and a set of examples at the bottom.

Existing invocations all keep working. Rendered output is unchanged apart from animated SVGs gaining the reduced-motion CSS block.

Install

brew install russmckendrick/tap/terminal-svg   # or: brew upgrade terminal-svg

Or grab a binary below (macOS arm64/amd64, Linux arm64/amd64, Windows amd64 — each with a SHA-256 checksum). rec is macOS/Linux only for now; rendering .cast files works everywhere.

Quick start

# an animated README demo that follows the viewer's light/dark mode
terminal-svg demo.cast --theme-light github-light --theme-dark github-dark

# render an asciinema 3 recording with its own terminal's colours
terminal-svg session.cast -t auto

# animate just the good bit
terminal-svg demo.cast --from 12 --to 31 -o highlight.svg

Docs: README · CLI reference · theme format · how it works

Bundled JetBrainsMono Nerd Font faces are under the SIL OFL; the code is MIT.

Full Changelog: v0.3.0...v0.4.0

v0.3.0 — Windows and Ubuntu get windows

terminal-svg screenshots no longer have to pretend they were taken on a Mac. A new --chrome flag dresses the window as a classic Windows PowerShell console or an Ubuntu GNOME Terminal, each with a matching built-in theme — and the macOS chrome was retuned to real-window proportions while we were at it. Both images below are terminal-svg's own output.

Highlights

• --chrome <macos|windows|ubuntu|none> — Windows renders the classic conhost console (white title bar, window icon, square corners, scrollbar gutter); Ubuntu renders GNOME Terminal's Ambiance look (dark header, orange close button, menu bar). Pair them with the two new built-in themes — powershell (conhost navy + the Campbell palette) and ubuntu (aubergine + Tango) — bringing the built-ins to nine.
• A more honest macOS window — 32 px title bar, true 12 px traffic lights, a fixed 12 px title in the system sans. Chrome is now fixed-size like a real window and no longer scales with --font-size.
• Light and dark in one file — --theme-light github-light --theme-dark github-dark emits a single static SVG carrying both palettes, switched by the viewer's prefers-color-scheme. One <img> tag, correct in both GitHub modes.
• Titles sort themselves out — with no --title, the window title falls back to the recording's own title, then the last OSC 0/2 report from your shell — shown Ghostty-style as 📁 ~/Code/blog — then the command string. --title-emoji swaps or drops the emoji.
• Freeze-frames and transparency — --at <seconds> renders the screen at any point in a recording; --no-background drops the window body, chrome, and shadow for a transparent floating-text embed.
• Themes can restyle the chrome — optional [chrome] keys (bar_bg, bar_fg, button_fg, button_bg) recolour the new title bars straight from your theme TOML.

There's also a new home: terminal-svg.dev — a showcase site with a gallery of every theme rendered in its native chrome, built from the repo and deployed on every release.

Existing invocations all keep working; the macOS chrome retune does change rendered output — deliberately, it has real proportions now.

Install

brew install russmckendrick/tap/terminal-svg

Or grab a binary below (macOS arm64/amd64, Linux arm64/amd64, Windows amd64 — each with a SHA-256 checksum). rec is macOS/Linux only for now; rendering .cast files works everywhere.

Quick start

terminal-svg --chrome windows -t powershell -- pwsh -c 'Get-ChildItem'
terminal-svg --chrome ubuntu -t ubuntu -- lsd -la
terminal-svg demo.cast --static --theme-light github-light --theme-dark github-dark

Docs: README · theme format · how it works

Bundled JetBrainsMono Nerd Font faces are under the SIL OFL; the code is MIT.

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.3.0

v0.2.0 — record it, replay it, embed it

terminal-svg can now record. Run terminal-svg rec, do your thing, exit the shell — and out comes an animated SVG replaying the whole session: GIF-quality demos at a fraction of the size, with real selectable text, that play anywhere an <img> tag does. GitHub READMEs included, no JavaScript. The image below is one — 42 KB, font embedded.

Highlights

• terminal-svg rec — records a live interactive session (your $SHELL, or rec -- <command>) on a real PTY at your current terminal size, keystrokes forwarded, window resizes captured. Exit the session and the animated SVG is rendered on the spot.
• asciicast v2 in and out — every recording is saved as a standard asciicast next to the SVG (asciinema play demo.cast just works), and any .cast file renders directly: re-theme or re-time a take without re-recording, or render recordings you already made with asciinema (terminal-svg session.cast -t github-dark).
• Replays that stay small — output bursts coalesce to ≤30 fps, pauses are capped at 2 s (--idle-time-limit), identical frames are dropped, and repeated rows are shared across frames via <defs>/<use>. A 120-line scrolling build log lands around 130 KB — font included.
• Plays everywhere — frames are toggled by plain CSS keyframes with step-end timing inside the SVG itself: crisp discrete frames, no cross-fading, no scripts, loops forever with a hold on the last frame. --speed to taste, --no-loop to play once and freeze, --static for just the final screen.
• The details still matter — a soft block cursor tracks the session, carriage-return progress bars and spinners replay exactly as they ran, mid-session window resizes grow the canvas, and per-frame font subsetting covers every glyph the whole recording touches.

Everything from 0.1.0 is untouched: the static screenshot CLI is byte-for-byte compatible, golden-tested to prove it.

Install

brew install russmckendrick/tap/terminal-svg

Or grab a binary below (macOS arm64/amd64, Linux arm64/amd64, Windows amd64 — each with a SHA-256 checksum). rec is macOS/Linux only for now; rendering .cast files works everywhere.

Quick start

terminal-svg rec -o demo.svg        # exit the shell to finish
terminal-svg demo.cast --speed 2 -t nord -o demo-nord.svg

Docs: README · theme format · how it works

Bundled JetBrainsMono Nerd Font faces are under the SIL OFL; the code is MIT.

Full Changelog: v0.1.0...v0.2.0

v0.1.0 — pixel-perfect terminal screenshots

The first release of terminal-svg — a single self-contained binary that turns terminal output into pixel-perfect SVG screenshots, complete with macOS-style window chrome. The image above is its own output.

Highlights

• Three capture modes — run a command in a real PTY (terminal-svg -- lsd -la), pipe ANSI through stdin, or render a captured dump file.
• Real terminal emulation — output goes through a proper VT state machine (asciinema's avt), so carriage-return progress bars, ESC[K clears, and cursor-repaint spinners resolve to exactly the final screen — no regex-stripped artefacts.
• Embedded font subsetting — only the glyphs you actually used are embedded as WOFF2 (typically a few KB), so the SVG renders identically everywhere: GitHub READMEs, blogs, machines with no fonts installed. Nerd Font powerline segments, box drawing, and wide CJK all align on the grid; emoji render through the viewer's native colour font.
• Full ANSI fidelity — truecolor, 256-colour, the classic 16, bold/dim/italic/underline/strikethrough/inverse.
• 7 built-in themes — dracula (default), catppuccin-mocha, nord, tokyo-night, github-dark, github-light, solarized-dark — plus custom themes from a small TOML file.

Install

brew install russmckendrick/tap/terminal-svg

Or grab a binary below (macOS arm64/amd64, Linux arm64/amd64, Windows amd64 — each with a SHA-256 checksum).

Quick start

terminal-svg --title "the proof" -o shot.svg -- cargo test

Docs: README · theme format · how it works

Bundled JetBrainsMono Nerd Font faces are under the SIL OFL; the code is MIT.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/russmckendrick/terminal-svg/commits/v0.1.0

Full Changelog: https://github.com/russmckendrick/terminal-svg/commits/v0.1.0