How to capture your screen and turn it into a GIF

GIFs are a powerful tool for showing a quick example of something. A GIF is worth a thousand words it feels like sometimes.

Here are some tips.

• capture with giphy capture
  • https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture
• Reduce colors and optimize with gifsicle. This will half the size.
  • On Mac with brew, install with brew install gifsicle
  • Run command gifsicle --colors 256 -O3 original.gif -o output.gif
  • Install the gif command into your ZSH with mkdir ~/bin && echo "gifsicle --colors 256 -O3 $1 -o $2" > ~/bin/gif.sh && chmod +x ~/bin/gif.sh && echo 'alias gif="~/bin/gif.sh" >> ~/.zshrc'. Then open a new ZSH session and run gif some-gif-to-optimize.gif the-optimized-gif-output.gif.
• reduce framerate (takes a while) https://ezgif.com/