Creating GIFs with Peek on CentOS 7

Sometimes it’s much simpler to show someone how to do something on a computer than it is to tell someone how to do it. If I need to show someone how to do something on Linux, I’ve found Peek to be a handy tool. Peek is a “simple animated GIF screen recorder with an easy to use interface”.

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an old picture file format that supports animations. It’s the ultimate video format — it’s portable, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s lightweight.

Peek has official installation instructions for a number of Linux distributions, but none for CentOS. And, unfortunately, Peek is not in CentOS’s default yum repositories or epel-release . Getting Peek up and running on CentOS 7 is fairly straightforward, though, because Peek provides official installation instructions via Flatpak. (Before I discovered Peek, I’d never heard of Flatpak. It seems to me to be similar to Docker.)

Installing Peek on CentOS 7

Install epel-release :

sudo \
yum -y install epel-release

Install Flatpak:

sudo \
yum -y install flatpak

Add the Flathub repository:

sudo \
flatpak \
remote-add \
--if-not-exists flathub \
https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Now Peek’s official installation instructions for Flatpak should work as written:

sudo \
flatpak \
install \
flathub \
com.uploadedlobster.peek

Launch Peek with this command:

flatpak \
run \
com.uploadedlobster.peek

Peek Demo

Here’s a short demo of what it looks like to use Peek:

And here is the resulting gif from that demo: