How to Create Vim Animated Gifs

I wanted to come up with a consistent way to make gifs that show just one vim plugin at a time. Here’s what I came up with. And here’s the gifs I made.

Vim Settings

Create essential.vim, which only contains the bare minimum you need for the gif. In my case this is:

set nocompatible
filetype plugin on

filetype off

set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#rc()
Plugin 'gmarik/Vundle.vim'

Plugin 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'

filetype plugin indent on

syntax on
set background=dark
let g:solarized_termcolors=256
colorscheme solarized
set tabstop=2 softtabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab
let mapleader = ","

But instead of Plugin 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim’, put whatever plugin you want to show.

Then run :PluginClean and :PluginInstall

Then set an alias to easily open vim with this configuration.

alias vi='vim -u ~/.vim/essential.vim'

iTerm 2 Settings

Open a new iTerm 2 window so that it will open at the exact right size that you have set in your iTerm 2 Preferences under Profiles -> Window. I have it set to 80 columns and 25 rows, which is the default.

Record with ttygif

ttygif is a program that lets you create animated gifs from the terminal. Make sure you have it installed and then record a session:

ttyrec myrecording

Open vim, record your keystrokes, and then when your done, quit vim and run:

exit

Then turn your session into a series of images by running (-f makes sure that it doesn’t crop anything):

ttygif myrecording -f

Delete then unnecessary frames, such as at the beginning and the end. Then you can convert it to an animated gif with ttygif

# on OSX, use concat_osx.sh instead
./concat.sh terminal.gif

or with ImageMagick:

convert -delay 20 *.png animated.gif

Crop the gif

This would look pretty great with the status bar, but it keeps flashing ttyrec and screencapture, so I decided to crop it out.

You can use ezgif.com to crop the gifs online.

Crop to this size:

• X1- 0
• Y1- 44
• W- 1300
• H- 808