Tired of re-recording my README demo GIF by hand, I turned the whole demo environment into code

The demo GIF at the top of an OSS README. That little clip that shows you what a tool does in five seconds, before a single line of prose does. That one.

I used to re-record mine by hand. Every single time.

Fire up the screen recorder, tidy up the terminal, type the command, stop at a good moment, export to GIF. Three minutes if it goes well. It usually doesn't. I fat-finger one character in the command. I hit that final q a beat too early and the recording ends before the screen I wanted to show even appears. Again. This time I notice, after exporting, that the terminal font size is different from last time. Again.

That's how "just one GIF" would casually swallow 30 minutes.

Hand-recording produces a slightly different picture every time