Termsnap 📸

Create SVGs from terminal output

Termsnap turns terminal output into vector graphics. It uses an in-memory instance of Alacritty under the hood to be compatible with many terminal control sequences.

Usage

See $ termsnap --help for CLI usage documentation. For example, to run the ls command and store the output in an SVG file, run:

$ termsnap -- ls -l > ./out.svg

Examples

These examples are generated by ./scripts/examples.sh. Note some of these examples send automated input to an interactive bash session.

Cowsay

$ termsnap --lines 9 --columns 28 -- cowsay Hello, world

Neovim

# On exit, for some terminals, Neovim clears the terminal screen by swapping
# back to the main terminal screen buffer. The `--render-before-clear` argument
# renders the terminal screen as it was just prior to that swap occurring.
$ termsnap --lines 12 --columns 60 --term xterm-256color --render-before-clear -- nvim --clean ./scripts/example.py <<EOF
:set number
:syntax enable
:q
EOF

ANSI colors

$ (
    # `sleep` gives bash time to be ready for the command, if this is omitted
    # the appearance of prompts can get messed up.
    sleep 0.05
    echo -ne "for x in {16..231}; do printf \"\\\e[48;5;\${x}m%03d\\\e[0m \" \$x; done\r"
    sleep 0.05
) | termsnap --lines 16 --columns 72 -- bash --noprofile --rcfile "$PWD/scripts/inputrc"

TTY information

$ (
    sleep 0.05
    printf "echo \$-\r"
    sleep 0.05
    printf "tty\r"
    sleep 0.05
) | termsnap --lines 12 --columns 60 -- bash --noprofile --rcfile "$PWD/scripts/inputrc"

Tokei

$ termsnap --lines 22 --columns 80 -- tokei

Installation

Install using Cargo:

$ cargo install termsnap

# Run ls
$ termsnap --columns 80 --lines 36 -- ls --color=always -l

# Run an interactive bash session
$ termsnap --interactive --out ./interactive-bash.svg -- bash

Run using Nix flakes:

# Run ls
$ nix run nixpkgs#termsnap -- --columns 80 --lines 36 -- ls --color=always -l

# Run an interactive bash session
$ nix run nixpkgs#termsnap -- --interactive --out ./interactive-bash.svg -- bash

The above takes Termsnap from the nixpkgs repository. To use the most up to date version on this repository's main branch, substitute nixpkgs#termsnap by github:tomcur/termsnap.

A note on fonts

The SVG generated by Termsnap makes assumptions about the metrics of the font used for text rendering. Specifically, the font's character advance, line height and descent metrics are used to determine how to lay out the terminal's cells in the generated SVG. The default metrics can be overriden by passing --font-{advance,line-height,descent} arguments to Termsnap. You can use the CLI program font-info to determine the metrics of the font you want to use. Alternatively, you can use the font editor Fontforge.

The font is not embedded and the text not converted to paths. If the client rendering the SVG can't find the specified font, the SVG may render incorrectly, especially if the metrics of the font used for rendering vary signficantly from the metrics used to generate the SVG. You can use, e.g., Inkscape to convert the text to paths---the downside is the text may lose crispness when rendering at low resolutions. You can also convert the SVG to a raster image.

# Text to path
$ inkscape --export-text-to-path --export-plain-svg --export-filename=./out.svg ./in.svg

# Render to raster image
$ inkscape --export-width=800 --export-filename=./out.png ./in.svg