asciicast

Turn R scripts into terminal screencasts

Lifecycle: experimental CRAN status Codecov test coverage R-CMD-check

asciicast takes an R script and turns it into an asciinema cast. It can simulate typing, and records all terminal output in real time as it happens.

Features

Limitations

Installation

You can install the released version of asciicast from CRAN:

install.packages("asciicast")

Examples

See the inst/examples directory for these examples.

Hello world

The input script:

print("Hello world!")

The result:

Asciicast demo in asciicast

Input script that uses asciicast itself:

#' Title: asciicast example recorded in asciicast
#' Empty_wait: 3
#' End_wait: 20

# An example for using asciicast, recorded in asciicast itself!      #!

# First, save the R code you want to run, in a script file.          #!
# The file can contain any code, including interactive code,         #!
# as long as it is a syntactically valid R file.                     #!

# Second, perform the recording with the `record()` function.        #!
# We are recording an example file now, that comes with the package. #!

src <- system.file("examples", "hello.R", package = "asciicast")
cast <- asciicast::record(src)

# `cast` is an `asciicast` object, which has some metadata and the   #!
# recording itself:                                                  #!

cast

# You can write `cast` to a JSON file that can be played by any      #!
# asciinema player. Or you can write it to an SVG file that can      #!
# be embedded into a web page, or a GitHub README.                   #!

svg <- tempfile(fileext = ".svg")
asciicast::write_svg(cast, svg, window = TRUE)

Errors are recorded

Input script with errors:

#' End_wait: 20
# Demonstrate that errors are handled well

# Base R error
library("not-this-really")
traceback()

# callr errors are saved to `.Last.error`, including a stack trace
library(cli)
callr::r(function() library("another-failure"))
.Last.error

License

MIT @ RStudio