VHS now ships with automatic GIF hosting making it easy to share your
VHS creations with your friends, foes, coworkers, and the internet. To publish
your GIFs just add the --publish flag.
vhs --publish demo.tape
But first things first.
VHS? What’s that?
In case you missed it, VHS is a tool that generates GIFs and videos of
terminal GIFs from code. To generate a GIF with VHS, you write a simple
.tape file, which instructs VHS how to interact with the terminal, and pass
it into the vhs binary.
Here’s what a .tape file could look like:
# Where should we write the GIF?
Output demo.gif
# Set up a 1200x600 terminal with 46px font.
Set FontSize 46
Set Width 1200
Set Height 600
# Type a command in the terminal.
Type "echo 'Welcome to VHS!'"
# Pause for dramatic effect...
Sleep 500ms
# Run the command by pressing enter.
Enter
# Admire the output for a bit.
Sleep 5s
Once you have written your .tape file, just pass it to VHS:
vhs < demo.tape
Voilà! VHS will output a shiny terminal GIF entirely generated from the code you wrote!
Publishing GIFs
We wanted to make sharing terminal GIFs with VHS as easy as creating them, so
we’re pleased to introduce vhs --publish.
When you add the --publish flag, VHS will host your GIF on vhs.charm.sh and
provide you with a URL that you can share with your fellow command-line
dwellers.
So this…
vhs --publish demo.tape
Will output this…
…which will then be available at a URL like https://vhs.charm.sh/vhs-6bx5XJGgNmJLVmvicnXJ9i.gif.
And if you forgot to pass the --publish flag while creating your GIF, worry
not. You can use vhs publish to host the GIF even after it’s already been
generated:
vhs publish demo.gif
Bonus: Home Video Recording
Want to play around with vhs --publish right now but don’t have any .tape
files laying around? Say hello to vhs record.
vhs record, a relatively new feature, will record your terminal activity and
write the output into a tape file, almost like magic.
vhs record > file.tape
# perform actions, do stuff...
vhs file.tape --publish
We hope that VHS makes it easy for you to record and share your terminal applications with others. We love seeing your terminal GIFs and you’re always welcome to share them with us.
And, as always, let us know if you have any feedback.