# 📺 tvmux - a tmux pane recorder

**URL:** <https://discourse.asciinema.org/t/tvmux-a-tmux-pane-recorder/985>\
**Category:** Show and tell\
**Tags:** cli\
**Created:** [May 20, 2025, 7:22am UTC](https://discourse.asciinema.org/t/tvmux-a-tmux-pane-recorder/985 "2025-05-20T07:22:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bitplane](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/discourse.asciinema.org/bitplane/32/593_2.png) [@bitplane](https://discourse.asciinema.org/u/bitplane)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2025, 7:22am UTC](https://discourse.asciinema.org/t/tvmux-a-tmux-pane-recorder/985/1 "2025-05-20T07:22:57Z")

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# ⁉ why!?

I wanted to record my terminal development workflow, so I can later summarise it and tune models on me programming and using TUI apps. So I did a proof of concept of collection by recording `asciinema rec -c "tmux att"`, which ended up being enormous and largely irrelevant.

Recording the top level is about 450MB for a day’s worth of hacking in my one day test. This compressed to ~15MB with xz, but I don’t have any idea of where the window splits are, and don’t trust LLM inference to infer them. As an example for comparison, a test window looks like this:

[https://asciinema.org/a/720036](https://asciinema.org/a/720036)

For my next iteration, I tried recording individual panes. Which, with lots of long-running jobs and monitors showing log files, ended up being … uh… a pane? Not just saving window geometry and stitching it back together again, but some background panes had excessively large outputs. They’re in the background, so I don’t care about them.

So for mk3, I made this recording tool that follows the active pane by detecting the pane change, dumping the contents, injecting control codes and stovepiping everything after it into `asciinema` via tail.

The session above looks like this as I navigate, which shows exactly what I’m up to, far better IMO:

[https://asciinema.org/a/720034](https://asciinema.org/a/720034)

# ▶ usage

Currently there’s a release, and you can just drop that into `~/.local/bin` but it’s really a test of the release process so is a bit flaky. For best results, run this from inside your tmux session:

```bash
$ git clone https://github.com/bitplane/tvmux.git
$ cd tvmux
$ make start
# ... some time later ...
$ make stop

```

You’ll see a symlink linking to the `.cast` file which will be under `./.cache`. There’s `make` steps for build and install but without

# What’s next?

- Per-project recording, which in my use-case is a per-window thing.
- Restoring alternative terminal buffers between switches
- Quantizing the data going in because they’re often too large. This looks much easier than it sounds now I have window snapshotting working.
- Config files, env vars and args via a bash library.
- Keep using it and adding turd polish!

## 🔗 links

- [🏠 home](https://bitplane.net/dev/sh/tvmux)
- [🐱 github](https://github.com/bitplane/tvmux)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![philiprhoades](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/discourse.asciinema.org/philiprhoades/32/429_2.png) [@philiprhoades](https://discourse.asciinema.org/u/philiprhoades)\
**Post date:** [May 20, 2025, 11:16pm UTC](https://discourse.asciinema.org/t/tvmux-a-tmux-pane-recorder/985/2 "2025-05-20T23:16:34Z")

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Very nice!

I only have very infrequent need for something like asciinema but I have been lurking here for a while because I find the stuff interesting . . I really need to play it more when I can get some time . .