Record screencasts with Peek on Gnome
In the Can

Lead Image © Roman Fedin, 123RF.com
A screencast shows what happens on the desktop. Peek lets you create screencasts in the blink of an eye and export them to popular formats.
As the famous saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But how many words can a video save you? A million, maybe? In many situations, a short screencast (i.e., a video of desktop events) gives a far better explanation of a problem or an action than wordy text with images. A wide range of tools is available for this purpose.
The range extends from SimpleScreenRecorder [1] to recordMyDesktop [2]. Compared with these candidates, the fairly recent Peek [3] has a very small feature set, but the program is not trying to compete with the more established applications. Originally, it simply recorded the desktop as a GIF, thus producing videos that were easy to embed into web pages. However, Peek now also supports more traditional video formats such as WebM and MP4.
Recording the Desktop
In terms of the interface, Peek is deliberately oriented on the LICEcap [4] screencast tool for Windows. The program shows a scalable transparent window that is always in the foreground on top of all your other applications. Everything inside the window frame, is grabbed as a video by the software when you click Record. After pressing Stop (Figure 1), Peek immediately saves the results on the hard disk.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.
-
LibreOffice 25.2 Has Arrived
If you've been hoping for a release that offers more UI customizations, you're in for a treat.
-
TuxCare Has a Big AlmaLinux 9 Announcement in Store
TuxCare announced it has successfully completed a Security Technical Implementation Guide for AlmaLinux OS 9.
-
First Release Candidate for Linux Kernel 6.14 Now Available
Linus Torvalds has officially released the first release candidate for kernel 6.14 and it includes over 500,000 lines of modified code, making for a small release.
-
System76 Refreshes Meerkat Mini PC
If you're looking for a small form factor PC powered by Linux, System76 has exactly what you need in the Meerkat mini PC.
-
Gnome 48 Alpha Ready for Testing
The latest Gnome desktop alpha is now available with plenty of new features and improvements.
-
Wine 10 Includes Plenty to Excite Users
With its latest release, Wine has the usual crop of bug fixes and improvements, along with some exciting new features.