Run Live Presentations in Terminal with doitlive

Productivity Sauce

The ability to script a command-line tool can come in handy in many situations. It can be useful when you give a live presentation, and you don't want your audience to fall asleep while you are pecking commands in the terminal, or when you need to create a smooth screencast demonstrating the capabilities of a command-line utility.

Enter doitlive, a tool that makes it possible to create a script containing a list of commands, and then run them in a fake terminal session by typing random text. This creates a perfect illusion of a real command-line activity. Installing and using doitlive is as easy as it gets. First of all, make sure that you have Python 2.7 or 3.3 (or higher) and pip installed on your system (to install the latter on Debian or Ubuntu, run the apt-get install python-pip command as root). Install then doitlive by running the apt-get install python-pip command as root. Create the session.sh file and enter the desired Bash commands. Run then the doitlive play session.sh command, and start typing.

doitlive also has a built-in recorder which can be used to record the sequence of commands instead of specifying them manually. Use the doitlive record command to start recording, and issue doitlive stop when you are finished. doitlive also supports themes, and you can view a list of available themes with the doitlive themes command. The -p switch lets you specify the desired theme: doitlive play session.sh -p [THEME]. You can find further info on using doitlive on the project's documentation page.