Creating an animated gif from the terminal

Animated gifs are a great way to quickly demonstrate small tasks on the screen. Videos are an overkill and making quality gifs is often quite a pain. I often use LICEcap to created animated gifs and it works great. However, it isn't exactly hacker friendly!

Max Woolf provided a great solution to do this using his video-to-gif-osx repo.

I prefer to use his video-to-gif_osx.sh script and it works great.

The only issue I faced on my Mac was related to imagemagick. Few png libs were missing and others seemed to face the other problem with their ImageMagick installations as discussed in this thread => ImageMagick package missing PNG? · Issue #14325 · Homebrew/homebrew

A full re-installation using this code worked perfectly for me:

sudo  brew install imagemagick --build-from-source

Use sh sudo chmod 777 video_to_gif_osx.sh to make the script executable. And then encode a screen recording done with QuickTime to the animated gif using sh ./video_to_gif_osx.sh test.mov

And, here is a outputted gif :-)