SVGs that feel like GIFs (koaning.io)

That is terrifying. Does look great though!

I thought people were just doing GIF color palette optimization with ffmpeg instead.

I like little TIL posts like this, introducing new tools and sharing first-hand experiences with them. Working around restrictions (like using animations in Github Markdown) leads to this kind of creative stuff. I looked at the resulting SVG https://koaning.io/posts/svg-gifs/parrot.svg and realised that a lot of inline SVG elements are used within inline SVG within..the SVG. I've never seen that before. So thank you very much for sharing.

Cool, but I’m not clear on why you have to upload and then download your cast file to make this work.

"SVG is inherently animated" is new to me, and now I'm going to spend my time on the bus thinking what might be done with that. Does it support infinite loop?

If the target is a GitHub readme, then you can embed a video directly. eg https://github.com/paulirish/git-recent#readme

That said, OP's SVG trick may be a smarter choice if the content is a terminal capture.

Today I learned something new, thx!

What does “Github supports these” mean here? Isn’t it the browser that has to support them?

You can do a lot of impressive things with SVGs. Some examples from Wikipedia (no JS in any)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/SMIL_mis... missile command clone

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U... tube map

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Rolling_... rolling shutter animation

It's pretty unintuitive that you can just copy text straight from an animation, but that's the neatest part of this!

Well, this is cool. I'll have to see how it handles the sorts of effects I show in the README at https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects. I don't know much about SVG but anything that attempts to actually store the text is going to create a very large amount of data. I'll try it for fun.

SVG is another proof of worse is better. Nothing should be animated via JavaScript, at least not imperatively.

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Tools for making animated SVGs from terminal recordings:

asciinema2svg: https://github.com/thenets/asciinema2svg

termsvg: https://github.com/MrMarble/termsvg

/? terminal svg: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=terminal+svg

/? svg animation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This is nice until you realize `svg-term-cli` appears to be abandoned

https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli/commits/master/

Last commit ~6 years ago. Does not appear to be any viable forks either.

Fortunately, I use nix to manage my system which sort of forces me to inspect the maintenance history of projects. Better than blindly installing `npm` packages in global namespace.

asciinema on the other hand is very interesting. Seems I can do without the svg aspect here, but something to keep in mind (svg animations).

This is very cool and useful for the readmes. Thank you for sharing

I’m wondering what other applications this could have

At least every CLI/terminal tool could use it to showcase their application

For some sick reason now I really want to convert some SVG architecture diagrams to movies which reveal the nodes in a dramatic anime battle style with zoom-ins, freeze frames, pulsating lines around, etc.

A word of caution: There are SVGs which can freeze a page, so make sure that you do not link to any third party SVGs. This is a known bug, but both the Google Chrome and Mozilla team do not want to fix it.

Here is an evil example SVG for demonstration.

DON'T CLICK THIS LINK UNLESS YOU WANT TO RISK CRASHING YOUR BROWSER!

https://asdf10.com/danger.svg

Obligatory mention of Sarah Drasner's fantastic (and somehow still valid and eye-opening in 2025) "SVGs Can Do That?" talk from 2017: https://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that

I freakin love SVG. Someday I hope we just end up with a browser standard:

* pluggable execution engine/memory model (WASM, JVM, CLR, etc)

* SVG output (binary or text)

From there, the developer can choose whatever model he wants to display a "page", no longer be limited to the Document Object Model.

For anyone interested, here’s my animated GitHub readme: https://github.com/edwinm

anyone knows if it's possible to convert gif to svg or mp4? for instance, I'd like to share a screen recording in svg. It might sound like a dumb idea, maybe it is

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I used SVG animations (and sites like https://www.svgator.com/) long before stuff like Rive or Lottie was commonplace. SVG animations are great.

I have an animated SVG on my README that is rebuilt once a day to include the weather and day of the week. Built during jury duty a few years ago :P https://github.com/jasonlong

Glad this was brought back to attention!