DEV Community: Divya A

Asciinema vs Savvy CLI: Terminal recording tools

Divya A — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 02:12:23 +0000

Savvy CLI and Asciinema are both powerful tools that can record terminal activity, but they serve different purposes and are built with different core functionalities.

Savvy

Purpose and Functionality

Savvy CLI is primarily designed to automate capturing actionable knowledge from terminal activity. Developers who need to document and share operational procedures or incident responses can easily create runbooks or non-developers can simply run those runbooks to get the job done.

Session Recording: Savvy captures command-line sessions and automatically converts them into detailed documentation like a runbook that anyone can run locally on their machine. These runbooks can include commands, links, and notes, providing a comprehensive guide for repetitive tasks or troubleshooting procedures.
AI Integration: Savvy uses LLMs to interpret and document terminal sessions, turning complex commands into easy-to-understand steps. Another AI component called Savvy Explain, can also generate explanations for shell commands, helping users understand what each command does.
Sharing and Collaboration: Users can share runbooks via simple links or export them to Markdown or MDX, facilitating easy integration with other documentation tools and platforms.

Asciinema

Purpose and Functionality

Asciinema is a tool for recording terminal sessions and sharing them as replayable videos. This makes it useful for educational content or demonstrations where seeing the real-time command execution is beneficial.

Session Recording: Asciinema captures every keystroke and output in the terminal, allowing others to view the session exactly as it occurred. Viewers can copy-paste the content they want directly from the recording.
AI Integration: Looking forward to it!
Sharing and Collaboration: Recorded sessions are stored in a lightweight, text-based format, which can be played back in any web browser. This makes it easier to share across different platforms without compatibility issues.

Final Thoughts

Savvy CLI is best suited for creating actionable, detailed documentation that can be used repeatedly by teams to standardize procedures or troubleshoot issues. Asciinema, however, is best suited for demonstrations where the process and flow of terminal activity are crucial for understanding.

Savvy’s runbook output format is text-based that can be edited and formatted further. Asciinema’s output is a shareable, replayable session that mimics the original terminal activity, but unfortunately cannot be edited.

Both tools provide valuable capabilities depending on user's needs!

AI copilot tools for your terminal

Divya A — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 06:56:17 +0000

ChatGPT has forever changed how we discover knowledge on the web. Below, I am sharing some products that have done the same for the terminal

Github copilot comes in the CLI version, though it forces a question and answer style format, which disrupts my flow

HeyCLI allows you to use your command line terminal in natural language

Savvy Ask Interactively turns natural language into shell commands. You can pass in files and ask savvy to generate commands that operate on your data.

Savvy Explain generates a simple and easy to understand explanation for any command or error message. I have stopped reading man pages thanks to Savvy!

So far Savvy has been very easy to use on the terminal. I’m also using it to create and share runbooks, like the ones below

Make your oncall easy with Savvy's AI

Divya A — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 01:07:15 +0000

Depending on the developer in charge of the oncall, an issue can be resolved in 15 minutes or after many hours and numerous escalations till the right person is paged.

Creating and sharing expertise to resolve user facing incidents is a critical requirement for a well functioning engineering team.

However, sharing the tools and knowledge to resolve user incidents is a high friction, manual process. Runbooks and commands are stored in general purpose editors like Slab, Notion, Google Docs, Microsoft etc which hinders discoverability, analytics and recall.

Savvy's AI eliminates all friction from creating and sharing knowledge. Savvy provides an unified dashboard to search across all runbooks.

Savvy's AI-generated runbooks don't look boring or intimidating with good UX and easy to follow steps, any developer with no prior knowledge of the issue, can automatically run these runbooks to resolve user-facing issues at lightning speed!

Get started with Savvy today at https://getsavvy.so/