Peek is a screen recorder with an easy to use interface. Peek makes it easy to create short screencasts of a screen area. It was built for the specific use case of recording screen areas, e.g. for easily showing UI features of your own apps or for showing a bug report. With Peek, you simply place the Peek window over the area you want to record and press "Record". Peek is optimized for generating animated GIFs, but you can also directly record to WebM or MP4 if you prefer. Peek is not a general-purpose screencast app with extended features but rather focuses on the single task of creating small, silent screencasts of an area of the screen for creating GIF animations or silent WebM or MP4 videos.
In this article, we will explain how you can install Peek on Ubuntu using the Peek-developer PPA.
We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system.
Install Peek from the Peek-developers PPA
The Peek-developers PPA developed and maintained by Philipp Wolfer is where you will always find the stable and latest versions of Peek. Please follow these steps in order to install Peek from this PPA:
Open the Terminal application and enter the following command as sudo in order to add the Peek Developers PPA to your system:
For a stable build
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/stable
For the latest daily build
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peek-developers/daily
Since I am looking for a stable version of the software, I will use the first command as follows:
Enter the password for sudo, after which the PPA repository will be added to your system.
Tip: Instead of typing the command, you can copy it from here and paste in the Terminal by using the Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut, or by using the Paste option from the right-click menu.
The next step is to update your system’s repository index through the following command:
$ sudo apt-get update
This helps you in installing the latest available version of a software from the Internet.
Now that you are done with adding the PPA, use the following apt-get command as sudo in order to install Peek to your system:
$ sudo apt-get install peek
Now the system will pick the Peek-developers PPA to install the software from.
You can check the version number of the installed software through the following command:
$ peek --version
Remove Peek
If you want to remove Peek installed through this method, run the following command as sudo in your Terminal:
$ sudo apt-get remove peek
You can then remove the added PPA repository through the following command:
$ sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/peek-developers-ubuntu-stable-bionic.list
You are now ready to record your Ubuntu screen to an animated gif file.