Freeze Frame ❄️ 📸

With VHS v0.7.0, you can capture the any moment during tape execution. Just add in Screenshot <filename>.png to your tapes:

Type ls
Enter

# Capture the output of 'ls'
Screenshot files.png

# Now, continue as you normally would
Type 'cd ..'
Enter

Your tape outputs a GIF, and outputs a file named files.png.

Copy-Paste Functionality!

VHS can now talk to your system clipboard. Please keep this in mind when executing tapes from unknown sources.

Copy "https://github.com/charmbracelet/huh"

Type 'curl '

Paste

Enter

New Modifiers + Keys Alert!

VHS v0.7.0 has some new additions: introducing the top level Shift+ modifier and the Insert + Delete keys!

# Shift things up a bit!
Shift+A
Shift+Tab
Shift+Enter

# Insert and delete to your hearts desire:
Insert
Delete

Thoughts? Questions? We love hearing from you. Feel free to reach out on Twitter, The Fediverse, or Discord.

Font Fallbacks, New modifiers, CursorBlink

This release of VHS features 3 new additions as well as several small bug fixes to make sure everything runs smoothly.

New Features

• bd35699: Apple Symbols font fallback for braille characters (@maaslalani)
• 4dd9a81: Alt + Shift modifiers (#316) (@elmarsan)
• 46cf42f: Cursor Blink settings (#324) (@tr3mor)

Font Fallback

VHS now falls back to using Apple Symbols on MacOS to render braille characters without empty dots.

Alt + Shift modifiers

Ctrl[+Alt][+Shift]+<char>

Ctrl commands can now be modified with Alt or Shift characters to perform different key press combinations.

Cursor Blink

Set CursorBlink false

To avoid cursor blinking, simply use the CursorBlink setting (defaults to true).

Thoughts? Questions? We love hearing from you. Feel free to reach out on Twitter, The Fediverse, or on Discord.

VHS Sorcery 🪄

This release of VHS includes a brand new Source command:
You can now include (Source) other tape files into other tape files to reuse collections of commands that you find yourself repeating. This allows you to build tape modules and compose parent tape files.

To get started, let's create two tape files:

touch source.tape
touch demo.tape

In source.tape place any commands you repeat often

Type "I'm being summoned."
Sleep 500ms
Enter

Then, in demo.tape, you can Source source.tape which will execute all the commands found in the sourced tape file.

Output out.gif
Set Height 1000
Source source.tape # this will execute all commands in ./source.tape
Type "That's all folks"
Enter

When you run vhs demo.tape it will perform all the commands within the tape file and when it reaches the Source invocation it will execute all the commands in type.tape:

Other features

• feat: Alt+Enter by @maaslalani in #305

Bug Fixes

This release of VHS fixes a bug that caused incorrect background rendering (#249).
In addition to using the latest version of VHS, you will also need to upgrade ttyd to use the latest commit on main.

• fix: use user shell for VHS record by @maaslalani in #279
• fix: powershell run command by @gaskeo in #290
• fix: output tape to stdout by @maaslalani in #294
• fix: record sleep only in supported time units by @tr3mor in #300

New Contributors

• @gaskeo made their first contribution in #290
• @bashbunni made their first contribution in #285
• @Xiol made their first contribution in #284
• @tr3mor made their first contribution in #300

Full Changelog: v0.4.0...v0.5.0

Thoughts? Questions? We love hearing from you. Feel free to reach out on Twitter, The Fediverse, or on Discord.

Terminal Decorations 🎨

The latest version of VHS includes a ton of new settings for you to play around with! These settings allow you to decorate your GIFs and make them look even more like terminal emulators.

This release also includes a new Alt command, a --quiet flag for silent outputs, and bug fixes when starting up different shells.

New Settings

• Margin: Adds a margin around the outside of your terminal, while Padding allows you to add padding inside the terminal.
• MarginFill: Adds a background color to the outside of the terminal. To change the background color of the terminal itself, use Set Theme and specify the background.
• WindowBar: Adds a terminal window frame/bar to the top of the GIF. This value can be one of Colorful, ColorfulRight, Rings, or RingsRight.
• WindowBarSize: Sets how the WindowBar should appear.
• BorderRadius: Sets the border radius of the terminal.

Set Margin 80
Set MarginFill "#674EFF"
Set WindowBar "Colorful"
Set WindowBarSize 40
Set BorderRadius 8

Launch with Shell

This version of VHS performs the Shell change upon launch, rather than switching shells after starting the ttyd process. This change should result in slightly faster recordings and reduce the occurrence of buggy flashes at the start of GIFs that appeared occasionally when shell switching was slow.

Set Shell zsh

Alt command

VHS now supports pressing the Left Alt key with the newly introduced Alt command. It behaves similarly to pressing Ctrl along with another key.

Alt+V

Quiet Output

If you prefer to create your VHS GIFs without any output, simply add the -quiet flag. This will minimize any output to just the essentials.

vhs demo.tape --quiet

Thoughts? Questions? We love hearing from you. Feel free to reach out on Twitter, The Fediverse, or on Discord.