A few months ago I was asked how I created animated gifs on Linux, and I said that I use silentcast. I also said that I'd write a blog post on it. I've been very busy since then, but now I have found some time when I remembered to post about it and am not exhausted.

Silentcast is a very versatile screen recording application that outputs either a set of png images, an animated gif, or 2 different types of video. It uses png files to store frames, so it isn't suitable for recording at a high fps or for very long, but it is still brilliant for recording short clips for your blog or to accopany a bug report.

Silentcast's dialogs stay in front of everything else that you have open, so you don't need to worry about loosing the window somewhere along the line. It integrates nicely with the Unity desktop (I haven't tried others yet), which makes it feel more intuitive and makes it easer to use. It also allows you to modify the intermediate png files before the final product is stitched together, too, allowing for precise edits to make the resulting gif loop perfectly.

It is written in bash, which makes it perfectly suited for usage on both Mac and Linux system , but I don't think that Windows is supported as of the time of posting. The other issue is that it took me a little while to work out how to record a custom area - this is done by the "Transparent Window Interior" option under "Area to be recorded". I also find it to be a little bit unpoliished around the edges (the icon especially needs some work), but overall it is an excellent piece of software that makes recording an animated gif on Linux a breeze - it's streets ahead of any other competing projects.

The animated gif above was taken and modified from Silentcast's GitHub project page.