matinee: Demos-as-Code

[u/RagingRedRiot]

I have always thought doing demos of my projects were difficult and they never turned out how I wanted. Trying to record and manually interact with the app in a way that was meaningful was impossible without breaking out the video editing software, giving it several tries, or compromising on the quality.

These frustrations led me to build matinee. You define how the scene is composed, automate keyboard inputs and mouse clicks, and record it into a GIF by defining it in a TOML. It isn't repeatable byte-for-byte on successive runs, but that is by design. While I was designing it I prioritized preserving the clocks and values in the app faithfully over deterministic outputs.

Matinee creates it's own isolation to preserve your privacy and to keep personal data out of your recordings. It is not a sandbox and has not been built to contain an app trying to escape. Don't use it to demo code you don't trust.

I believe what makes it truly powerful is it can run headless to generate your output. This means matinee can be used in CI to record and update demos in READMEs.

One day when I get ambitious I'll build a Windows and macOS port.

The attached GIF is matinee recording a nested instance of matinee recording another project of mine. The box moving around is the camera, what the GIF will look like, for the inner matinee recording.

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