📺 tvmux
asciinema tmux pane recorder
⁉️ why!?
I wanted to record my terminal development workflow, so I can later summarise it
and tune models on me programming and using TUI apps. So I did a proof of
concept of collection by recording asciinema rec -c "tmux att", which ended up
being enormous and largely irrelevant.
Recording the top level is about 450MB for a day’s worth of hacking in my one day test. This compressed to ~15MB with xz, but I don’t have any idea of where the window splits are, and don’t trust LLM inference to infer them. As an example for comparison, a test window looks like this:
https://asciinema.org/a/720036
For my next iteration, I tried recording individual panes. Which, with lots of long-running jobs and monitors showing log files, ended up being … uh… a pane? Not just saving window geometry and stitching it back together again, but some background panes had excessively large outputs. They’re in the background, so I don’t care about them.
So for mk3, I made this recording tool that follows the active pane by detecting
the pane change, dumping the contents, injecting control codes and stovepiping
everything after it into asciinema via tail.
The session above looks like this as I navigate, which shows exactly what I’m up to, far better IMO:
https://asciinema.org/a/720034
▶️ usage
Currently there’s a release, and you can just drop that into ~/.local/bin but
it’s really a test of the release process so is a bit flaky. For best results,
run this from inside your tmux session:
$ git clone https://github.com/bitplane/tvmux.git
$ cd tvmux
$ make start
# ... some time later ...
$ make stop
You’ll see a symlink linking to the .cast file which will be under ./.cache.
There’s make steps for build and install but without testing, who knows where
the outputs will go (lol)
What’s next?
- Per-project recording, which in my use-case is a per-window thing.
- Restoring alternative terminal buffers between switches
- Quantizing the data going in because they’re often too large.
- Config files, env vars and args via a bash library.
- Keep using it and adding turd polish!