Saturday, July 7, 2012: ttycast: Broadcast your tty to the world!

ttycast is a Node.js app that allows you to broadcast your tty online, in really real time!

Sometimes I teach my friends some programming over Skype, and to show them code, I have to share my screen or paste my code in the chat box and let him try out himself.

Sharing screen is usually slow, and has very low frame rate. And I can’t figure out how to share part of my screen.

Now I really like Destroy All Software’s screencasts, where almost everything in his screencasts is done inside a terminal. I am really inspired by it and think:

Wouldn’t it be great if I can share what I’m seeing inside a terminal easily?

I think it’d be very fast, because only text needs to be sent, I think it’ll be very smooth like when I use SSH. I also see that there’s already a terminal emulator written in JavaScript out there and there’s already a tool to record my terminal screen, ttyrec.

Introducing ttycast

This app is a result of putting together several libraries:

and there’s less than 80 lines of my code.

So, to get started, just read the README!

screenshot