Hey everyone, I’m new to the dev.to platform and I want to share something I’ve been building for a while. I created an open-source Rust tool called NEX. It’s a terminal recorder and real-time collaboration tool. I noticed that terminal workflows are powerful but often poorly documented in software engineering. We spend hours in the CLI deploying servers, fixing production issues, running migrations, teaching juniors, pair programming, or experimenting locally. However, once a terminal session ends, most of that context is lost. Command history doesn’t tell the whole story, screenshots miss timing and interactivity, logs lose intent, and screen recordings can be heavy, noisy, and hard to analyse.
NEX was designed to address these issues by recording terminal sessions with PTY-level accuracy. It captures exactly what the terminal sees and does, including interactive programs like vim or htop, ANSI colours, cursor movements, and precise timing information. Instead of just dumping text, NEX saves an accurate representation of the entire session. You can replay it later exactly as it happened, with commands and outputs appearing at the same speed as the original run. Additionally, NEX extracts structured metadata such as command execution timelines, exit codes, and timestamps. This allows you to inspect and export terminal activity as real data instead of static logs. You can convert recorded sessions into CSV or JSON and use them in spreadsheets, dashboards, audit reports, or automation pipelines, which is something I missed when analysing or documenting complex CLI workflows.
Another major reason I built NEX is for collaboration. Explaining terminal issues over chat or screen-sharing can be frustrating and ineffective. NEX lets you share a live terminal session over the network, so others can watch or collaborate in real time. Each participant can also keep their own local recording of the session. There’s even a web mode that allows people to view the session from a browser without needing to install anything, which is great for demos, workshops, or non-technical stakeholders.
Compared to existing tools like script, asciinema, or traditional screen recording, NEX aims to combine the best features of all of them while avoiding their limitations. It’s lightweight, accurate, replayable, analysable, and fully open source and best of all it can serve it on website where they could just directly catch it in their phone or any device which has access to that network and have a web browser. I chose Rust for its performance, safety, and reliability, which are crucial when intercepting PTY streams and managing long-running sessions. NEX is designed to have minimal overhead, so you can leave it running without worrying about resource use. If you’re into DevOps, backend engineering, teaching, onboarding, compliance, or care about terminal craftsmanship, NEX could genuinely improve your workflow. You can record a session, replay it later to see what happened, share it live with teammates while debugging remotely, or export the data for further analysis, all with a straightforward CLI-first experience.
I built NEX because I believe terminal work represents knowledge, and that knowledge deserves better tools than fragile logs or unclear recordings. The project is actively developed and fully open source. I’d love feedback, ideas, or contributions from anyone interested. If you want to check it out, the site is nex-terminal.netlify.app and the repository is on GitHub at github.com/aryansrao/nex.
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