How To Play GIF In Your Terminal

A tutorial on playing GIF in your terminal using gif-for-cli in Linux or Mac OS. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Make your terminal lit 🔥.

You might have seen ASCII arts on your terminal like the ones below when installing a new module/library in your system. Some developers (or even you might have) configure a static ASCII art which appear when they open their terminal. But have you ever seen a GIF running in your Swiss Army knife like terminal? 👀 That would give life and a personality to your terminal!

ASCII Arts in terminal

Nothing is impossible. Now even playing a GIF on your terminal is possible. GIF has been around us for long 31 years (seriously? 😲) and what better time it is to see GIF in your terminal.

Getting Started

Requires Python 3 (with setuptools and pip), zlib, libjpeg, and ffmpeg, other dependencies are installed by setup.py.

Install dependencies

# Debian based distros
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg zlib* libjpeg* python3-setuptools
# Mac
brew install ffmpeg zlib libjpeg python

Your Python environment may need these installation tools -

sudo easy_install3 pip
# This should enable a pre-built Pillow wheel to be installed, otherwise
# you may need to install Python, zlib, and libjpeg development libraries
# so Pillow can compile from source.
pip3 install --user wheel

Install gif-for-cli

Install from PyPI:

pip3 install --user gif-for-cli

Or download this repo and run:

python3 setup.py install --user

The gif-for-cli command will likely be installed into ~/.local/bin or similar, you may need to put that directory in your $PATH by adding this to your .profile:

# Linux
if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi
# Mac, adjust for Python version
if [ -d "$HOME/Library/Python/3.6/bin/" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/Library/Python/3.6/bin/:$PATH"
fi

GIF in action

I’ll be using my favorite Slackmoji — Party Parrot for playing in the terminal.

Party Parrot. (Reddit Party Parrot Community)

Don’t know about Party Parrot? It’s quite an interesting story. Read it out here.

Cult of the party parrot: How a ridiculous bird became an emoji hero

After the installation, run the following command in your terminal and enjoy the party 😉. The following command queries the Tenor’s GIF API and returns the top GIF.

gif-for-cli "party parrot"

Party Parrot in terminal. (Recorded with Peek)

For exploring more gif-for-cli usage options, check the link below.

google/gif-for-cli

What about Windows users? 😕

Currently, this is not supported on Windows platform. Though, there is an open issue on GitHub’s repo for Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell support. You can subscribe to that issue or keep a watch on the repository. Or a much better initiative, switch to Linux 😎 as soon as possible or just wait forever.

Let’s see what GIF you have put up on your terminal. Comment down below your terminal images with GIF in action 📷.

Thank you for reading! Your each 👏 would motivate me to write more helpful articles and make open source contribution. You can further connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, GitHub, Twitter and Facebook.