Building a Recorder with PTYs and Python

I have a theory that only bad projects get finished — good ones keep finding new things to do. Asciinema is a case in point. What started as a way to share terminal sessions with friends has, over 14 years, grown into a full suite of tools covering recording, hosting, playback, and live streaming — and been rebuilt multiple times along the way. So what does it actually take to record and replay a terminal session faithfully in a browser?

Joining us for this conversation is Marcin Kulik, Asciinema's creator. The project's architecture has passed through almost every interesting corner of software engineering: a Python recorder built around pseudo-terminals (PTY), a ClojureScript terminal emulator for the browser that hit performance limits with immutable data structures and garbage collection pressure, a move to Rust compiled to WebAssembly, a Go experiment that didn't last, and a new Rust CLI for concurrent live streaming backed by an Elixir/Phoenix server that calls Rust code via NIFs. The same Rust terminal emulator library now powers all three components — the browser player, the server, and the CLI.

If you've ever looked at those terminal animations embedded in a README and wondered what's underneath them, or if you're interested in how a passionate open-source developer navigates 14 years of language changes and rewrites, this conversation has plenty to offer.

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Asciinema: https://asciinema.org

Asciinema Docs: https://docs.asciinema.org

Asciinema CLI (GitHub): https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema

Asciinema Player (GitHub): https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player

Asciinema Server (GitHub): https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-server

AVT - Rust terminal emulator library: https://github.com/asciinema/avt

vt-clj - the original ClojureScript terminal emulator: https://github.com/asciinema/vt-clj

Paul Williams' ANSI/VT100 State Machine Parser: https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org

WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org

SolidJS: https://www.solidjs.com

Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org

Phoenix Framework: https://www.phoenixframework.org

Rustler (Rust NIFs for Elixir/Erlang): https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

Clojure: https://clojure.org

ClojureScript: https://clojurescript.org

cmatrix: https://github.com/abishekvashok/cmatrix

Marcin Kulik on GitHub: https://github.com/ku1ik

Marcin Kulik on Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@ku1ik

Marcin Kulik on asciinema.org: https://asciinema.org/~ku1ik

"They're Made Out of Meat" demo: https://asciinema.org/a/746358

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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0:00 Intro

2:28 What Is Asciinema?

4:48 How Asciinema Started

9:51 The Problem of Parsing Terminal Output

14:07 Building a Cross-Platform Recorder

17:01 Rewriting the Parser in ClojureScript

22:19 The Hidden Complexity of Terminals

29:28 Rendering Terminals in the Browser

39:47 When ClojureScript Can't Keep Up

45:28 Moving to Rust and WebAssembly

52:01 The Go Experiment

57:43 Adding Live Terminal Streaming

1:07:12 Can You Scrub Back in a Live Stream?

1:14:40 Editing Recordings

1:25:27 Outro