Feature Request(wishlist): SVG animation support

[groutoutlook]

Hi, thanks for the great tool! It helps me share code/shell output in forum(or general chat platform) where code highlighting is limited, save me a lot of explaination.

For the FR, my niche use case is for bug filling/PR preview where I can make some simple demo. It's way faster than make user(s) self-built things, quicker feedback, lead to better (work) performance.

It's more of an unrealistic idea considering the tools are more devoted to single files output, but I wish this feature will land on this tool somedays.

Regards,
golk.

Reference

• asciinema usage with svg-term-cli to create SVG movies - asciinema.org
• Feature request: Recording · Issue #469 · microsoft/terminal

[pamburus]

Thanks for the feature request, @groutoutlook! I like the idea — SVG animation support would be a natural extension of what termframe does today.

Beyond your use case, it would also help address issues like #583, where commands with animated output (spinners, progress bars) currently cause problems with static capture. With animation support, we could actually run interactive commands attached to the current terminal (similar to how asciinema rec works), requiring just a Ctrl+D or exit to end the session, and produce an animated SVG as a result.

For static screenshots, additional tooling would be needed on top of that — extracting a single frame or trimming the timeline — which is something asciinema already supports.

That said, this is a significant undertaking and would overlap quite a bit with asciinema's feature set, so I want to think carefully about the scope. One option worth exploring is relying on asciinema and svg-term under the hood rather than reimplementing their recording and animation features, and focusing on what termframe adds on top — styled frames, themes, embedded fonts, and so on.

In the meantime, you can get basic animated SVGs with a small wrapper script:

#!/bin/bash

set -euo pipefail

OUT_FILE=${1:?}
TMP_FILE=$(mktemp)

asciinema rec -f asciicast-v2 "${TMP_FILE:?}"
svg-term --in "${TMP_FILE:?}" --out "${OUT_FILE:?}"

This records a session with asciinema and converts it to an animated SVG via svg-term-cli. Note that this is not a full replacement for the requested feature — the output won't have termframe's styled frames, themes, embedded fonts, or other termframe-specific rendering.

I'll keep this issue open for tracking.