Download websites that use Asciinema

About Asciinema

A terminal recording is a peculiar thing to embed in a web page, and video would be the easier option. Projects reach for this player instead because a screen capture of a command line is wasteful and slightly useless: the text cannot be selected, the file is heavy, and a reader who wants the command has to retype it from a picture. Asciinema records characters and timing rather than pixels, so playback is a text stream replaying at the original speed, light enough to load without thought and copyable while it runs.

The marker is therefore less a technology choice than a signal about audience. Pages carrying the player are pages written for people who live in a shell: open source project sites, developer documentation, installation guides, security tooling, infrastructure vendors demonstrating a command line interface. Marketing sites aimed at non-technical buyers do not embed terminal casts. Finding the player on a company domain is a fair indication that the company sells to engineers, or at least that engineers control that part of the site.

As of September 2026 we record Asciinema on 177 sites, and the number understates the practice rather than the tool. Many projects link out to a hosted recording instead of embedding the player, and a link leaves no fingerprint in the page. Others self-host the recorder, which is Apache 2.0 licensed and written in Python, and serve the player from their own assets under filenames we may not recognize. A count of embeds is a floor beneath a considerably larger population of users.

For a researcher the value sits in the correlation rather than in the tool itself. A directory of sites that embed terminal recordings is close to a directory of developer-facing documentation on the open web, assembled without reading a single page. Developer relations teams use sets like that to find where their peers publish, competitive analysts use them to map which vendors document a command line at all, and anyone building tooling for technical writers gets a ready-made population to study. Our Video players classification is doing no work here, which is itself a hint that the interesting attribute is the audience rather than the function.

None of that is reachable a domain at a time. A lookup confirms what one site does. The export shows the shape of a publishing habit: which hosts, which stacks, which sectors, and whether the habit is spreading or quietly being replaced by video after all. Counts this small are a good argument for whole-dataset access, because a needle-sized population stays invisible unless you already hold the haystack.