Show HN: Termstage – Animated terminal SVGs from YAML, no screen recording

[saikatkumardey]

I built termstage because I was tired of screen-recording CLI demos and ending up with heavy GIFs that look bad in READMEs.

termstage lets you describe a terminal session in YAML and renders it as an animated SVG — lightweight, crisp at any size, embeds directly in GitHub READMEs.

Example:

  steps:
    - cmd: "notes list"
      output: "#1  Fix the login bug"
    - cmd: "notes done 1"
      output: "Marked #1 as done"

Run `termstage render demo.yaml --animated` and you get an SVG you can drop anywhere.

Install: pipx install termstage

GitHub: https://github.com/saikatkumardey/termstage PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/termstage/

[lazystone]

> I was tired of screen-recording CLI demos

What was wrong with https://asciinema.org/ ?

[saikatkumardey]

Nothing, honestly. asciinema needs a JS player to render, GitHub READMEs don't support it as a native image. termstage outputs plain SVG, so it's just an <img> tag that works anywhere.

[lazystone]

Like this https://asciinema.org/a/377532 ?

:)

[saikatkumardey]

yep, but your pipeline now is record → upload → download cast → run svg-term → SVG. termstage skips the recording step and goes straight to SVG from a YAML spec.