TL;DR

Sometimes I use asciinema and I’m fed up of remembering all options.

When I want to record a “termcast” with asciinema, I always struggle a bit to remember the options and to get the prompt right. So I figured… why not wrap it in a script with my defaults?

Here’s what it does:

• I usually record stuff in a standard size terminal, i.e. one that is 80 columns wide and 25 rows tall (call me a romantic… or granpa 🙄). Hence, I do a pre-check to make sure I don’t record the whole thing just to realize that I have to do it again with the right size;
• I set a filename to a temporary file if nothing is provided;
• The prompt in the termcast is set to a plain, anonymous $ . After all, everything else might be distracting to the viewer (although sometimes it might come handy);
• asciinema allows you to jump big idle periods by capping their maximum amount. I usually put it to one second, so that I can take my time during the recording (e.g. to do some copy-and-paste or whatever);
• so many time something goes wrong (e.g. I forget deleting a file) and I have to start over - this is why I set overwriting by default;
• last, I set to use a plain shell, to avoid loading all the bash stuff I have (which would also jeopardize my prompt, by the way).

So… here’s arec:

Local copy here.