[nycbug-talk] console "screencast" tools?

[Charles Sprickman]

I really like to save my late-night oddball questions for this list.

When I'm documenting things in a wiki (in my case, mediawiki), I
often find myself doing a tedious series of copy and paste
operations from my terminal to "pre" blocks in the wiki.  It's time
consuming, error-prone, and not really great documentation when you
need to show a longer series of "do this, look for output like this"
operations.

I know I could run some fancy screen capture thing, upload some huge
video to one of the video sharing sites (forgetting the privacy
concerns for the moment), and then embed that in the wiki.  But that
seems incredibly wasteful.  We're just talking text here, not a bunch
of point-n-drool config panels…

Is there any clever way of doing this that I've missed?  I have seen
some neat examples of a bunch of text getting "played back" in a
broswer using javascript to control a page element with a ton of
text, but not anything that maintains a certain pacing.  I'd settle
for video as a final format if I could find some alternate way of
capturing the session that is more like "script" (but with timing
cues) than a real screen capture.  The idea is that whatever tool
builds the movie is doing the actual text rendering so I'd at least
end up with a clean, easy to compress video.  Hope that makes some
kind of sense.

Any of you folks that make it to lots of conferences ever see a
presenter using some novel way of showing a sequence of commands
like this?

Thanks,

Charles