What is vhs-terminal-recorder?

A tool for creating scripted recordings of terminal sessions from `.tape` files. It can render command-line demos as GIF, MP4, or WebM videos.

Creating reproducible terminal demos, documenting command-line behavior, and authoring, checking, or rendering VHS tape files.

It removes the need to record terminal actions manually and helps make demonstrations repeatable. It also separates setup commands from the commands viewers need to see.

vhs-terminal-recorder — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by tmchow

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add tmchow/agent-skills --skill vhs-terminal-recorder

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tmchow/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tmchow/agent-skills/vhs-terminal-recorder.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,897 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00086	$0.01897
Opus 5.5	$0.00034	$0.00759
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00017	$0.00379
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00190

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 71259630ed7c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vhs-terminal-recorder scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

vhs-terminal-recorder/SKILL.md · 183 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 183 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

VHS Terminal Recorder

When to use

Use this skill only when vhs or Charmbracelet VHS is actually the right surface:

user says vhs, Charmbracelet VHS, .tape, terminal GIF, terminal recording, command-line screencast, or scripted terminal demo
docs need a reproducible recording of CLI behavior
an existing VHS tape needs authoring, validation, rendering, or debugging

Do not use it for arbitrary desktop capture, browser product tours, video editing, or one-off interactive work that cannot be made deterministic. Use a video/screen-capture workflow instead when the subject is not a terminal.

Mental model

VHS runs a tape file in a pseudo-terminal and renders the terminal session to GIF, MP4, or WebM. Treat a tape like a small executable test:

the tape must create or point at deterministic state
commands shown to viewers should be short and intentional
setup belongs behind Hide / Show
vhs validate checks tape syntax but does not prove the commands work
vhs <file> executes the tape and can mutate files, hit the network, or run project commands

This skill is not the VHS language reference. For exact syntax, generate or inspect live docs:

vhs --help
vhs manual
vhs new /tmp/example.tape
vhs validate /tmp/example.tape

Setup and verification

VHS is the Charmbracelet CLI from https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs. Before depending on it, verify the local binary and help:

vhs --version
vhs --help

Use command-specific help for current flags:

vhs record --help
vhs validate --help
vhs publish --help

Rendering also depends on the local VHS render stack, especially ttyd and ffmpeg. If vhs validate passes but rendering fails before running the tape, check those binaries before changing tape logic.

If vhs is missing and the user wants it installed, prefer the upstream-supported package manager for the current machine. The common macOS/Linux path is:

brew install vhs

For Windows, Arch, Nix, Docker, Debian/RPM packages, or Go source installs, use the upstream installation section instead of copying commands from memory: https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs#installation

Read the full file on GitHub · 183 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

README.md 2.3 KB

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 183 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 71259630ed7c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vhs-terminal-recorder is a skill published in the GitHub repository tmchow/agent-skills (68 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,897 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Creative and media

vhs-terminal-recorder next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
vhs-terminal-recordertmchow/agent-skills	Skill	68	2mo ago	MIT	A	86	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	103	Claude Code