Peek – A Simple Animated Gif Screen Recorder for Linux

Peek Gif Recorder is the perfect screen capture tool for short and sharp video clips. It was designed to use ffmpeg and ImageMagick to take screencasts of your desktop and animate them to make them Gifs.

It’s that nifty tool for those who might want to demo a bug or a brief gameplay session quickly.

Features of Peek Gif Recorder

Peek offers only one feature, and that is to provide users with top-quality gif files of assigned portions of their desktop screens. You can open its preferences to choose to open the gif file after saving and the options to set delay count, resolution down-sampling, and framerate.

Install Peek in Linux Systems

You can install Peek’s latest version via its PPA on Ubuntu and Debian distributions:

On Debian and Ubuntu

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install peek

If you want to have the latest development version of Peek, you can install it using PPA with daily builds repository as shown:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/daily
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install peek

On Fedora Linux

Fedora user’s can use RPM Fusion repo to install it.

$ sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
$ sudo dnf install ffmpeg
$ sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-ugly
$ sudo dnf install peek

Arch Linux users can simply install with:

$ sudo pacman -S peek

Other Linux distribution users can build and install Peek using CMake as shown:

$ git clone https://github.com/phw/peek.git
$ cd peek
$ meson --prefix=/usr/local builddir
$ cd builddir
$ ninja

# Run directly from the source
$ ./peek

# Install system-wide
$ sudo ninja install

For more information visit the Github project page at https://github.com/phw/peek

How useful do you think Peek can be? Should its approach to app features remain the same? For me, this has taken the green recorder’s place. Share your thoughts in the comments below.