Updated on May 4, 2021 in #linux

Bash Aliases to Prepare Recording Videos

A few shell aliases from my dotfiles that help me prepare to record but you can use this concept for other things too.

I record a few videos a week usually and for a while now I’ve been using both a start-recording and stop-recording alias to set a larger terminal font, backup and restore my shell history and clear Vim’s temporary files.

I recently added these aliases to my dotfiles. Maybe you can use them for either recording your own videos or as inspiration to automate something you do on a regular basis. That’s really the main takeaway here. Be relentless in reducing friction for things you do regularly.

# Going Over the Start and Stop Recording Aliases

Timestamps

• 0:24 - What I typically do before recording a video
• 0:50 – Going over what the start-recording alias does
• 3:16 – Going over what the stop-recording alias does
• 4:03 – Taking a look at the alias script for start-recording
• 4:22 – Changing the MS Terminal font size from the command line
• 6:15 – How to backup your shell history and clear it
• 6:59 – Deleting Vim’s temporary files
• 7:19 – Optionally launching OBS in Windows from WSL 2
• 9:50 – Taking a look at the alias script for stop-recording
• 10:42 – Reviewing the output of both recording aliases again
• 11:15 – What are you going to use this for? Let me know!

Reference Links

• https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/resize-and-see-how-big-any-window-is-using-a-free-tool-called-sizer
• https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles
• Recording aliases from dotfiles
• https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/shell-script-accepting-user-input-heredocs-in-place-edits-and-more

Are you going to use this for anything? Let me know below.