I think it can work well as a demo, but I wouldn't call that documentation.

If you need to find something out, having to wait or randomly click through a video is extremely frustrating.

If it's a video, it does noe exist for me. I could watch them, but I have better things to watch if I want to watch something. So I move on to something else.

Most of us read far faster than someone umming and ahing through a presentation in a monotone can speak.

At the very least, give us a frigging transcript.

A transcript would be great, but it struck me in these days of deep learning it's just a question of time before someone does a "speedup" option for videos that instead of just increasing the speed of the video, combines that with "smart" cuts like removing umming and ahing and unnecessary dead space, and tries to apply other simplifications as well (I'd still prefer text, but I'm sure there'd be an upside for people who like video).

And imagine even a more aggressive "video summarizer" generating articles from videos with interspersed screenshots or brief video segments where they matter for the understanding...

Ew, people are using it for docs? It always seemed clearly to be for those quick-look demos on projects' home pages, and it's fantastic for that.

Asciinema is used for docs-ish in git-branchless's readme: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/blob/master/README...

It does have formal docs, but I didn't fully understand the program after reading them. I didn't enjoy sitting through branchless's videos or clicking around for the right point in time.

What exactly is the advantage of asciinema over a video or a GIF if you're just showing something? If I don't need to copy text out of it, it has the same function as a video.

It's rendered by your browser so you get properly subpixel-hinted text instead of the horrible, blurry, compressed screenshot effect a video or gif gives. Also it's more convenient to generate than faffing around with screencasting software.

Edit: well, not (lossily) compressed in the case of a gif but not as nice as text properly rendered for your display.

I'd guess it's the bandwidth and compared to a GIF, you can pause them. While it's not usual to copy text from it, I've done that once this month and thought it was neat to be able to do that. I do believe that they have an advantage over video/GIF.

It's definitely better than a GIF because you can seek forward. You never know when a GIF ends, and if you're distracted, you have to wait for it to loop back again.

Note that this is a function of the GIF viewer. An image / video viewer that can play GIFs with length, speed, and movement controls would afford this.

vlc seems to do this (Android version).

I'll grant that the usual methods of interacting with GIFs don't do this, and am not arguing that they do. But if you really want a specific functionality, you can look for a tool which might provide that.

It has, if the thing you are showing fits the media. If you show the different flags of ls without explaination you would be better of just showing me the printout of ls -h

If you are showing off some beautiful TLI, an interactive prompt or ascii animations, this is the perfect tool.

As someone who works in film: film also doesn't lend itself to everything. Certain internal observations that work great in literature would be unwatchable on film etc.

Or to take it to the extreme: you don't expect the overview of an database to be experimental performance video art.

> If you are showing off some beautiful TLI, an interactive prompt or ascii animations, this is the perfect tool.

If you want to just show something off, a GIF (or real video) is the answer.

The defining feature of asciinema is that you can copy the text out of the animation. Which is actually not that useful most of the time, because you can't search for text in asciinema (AFAIK?) like you can in, well, documentation.

> a GIF (or real video) is the answer.

Why so? You can't pause or seek GIFs. GIFs and video files are usually several times larger than asciinema recordings of the same content. And you can't copy text out of them when it is useful.