giph

giph is a screen recorder that records the desktop, a window or selection and encodes it into a gif file. It prints the encoded gif directly to standard output when omitting the output filename.

I used giph to record a gif of giph recording a gif.
Command used in this demo: giph -s -l -c 0.3,0,0.6,0.3 ~/Videos/$(date +%s).gif

Examples

$ giph -s -l -c 1,1,1,0.3 -b 5 -p -5 out.gif 

Select a window or area with slop. The selection rectangle is highlighted in a transparent blue color abd has a 5px border on the inside. After stopping the recording with either ctrl+c, by running giph --stop or by sending a SIGINT to the processgroup, the resulting gif is written to out.gif.

$ giph -g 100x200+0+0 -d 5 -t 10

Records a 100x200 pixel rectangle in the top left corner of the screen. The recording starts after a 5 seconds countdown and will record for exactly 10 seconds. The resulting gif will be printed to standard output, which makes this able to be piped into other scripts like a file-upload to an image hosting service.

Installation

Arch

$ yay -S giph

Or install giph-git to get the latest development version.

From source

Make sure to install the following dependencies:

• ffmpeg
• xdotool

Optionally, install the following dependencies:

• slop (--select)
• libnotify (--notify)
• pgrep (--stop)

Clone the giph repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/phisch/giph.git

And finally install giph:

$ cd giph
$ sudo make install