June 5, 2026 · 5 min read
We added terminal recording. Here's why we built it, how it works, and why it's off by default (spoiler: it's about security).
If you've ever debugged a production issue with two other people on a Zoom call, all trying to type into the same SSH session and talking over each other — you know the pain. Terminal recording lets you do that, but asynchronously and without the "who's typing?" confusion.
It's also great for onboarding. Instead of a junior dev shadowing you for 3 hours (both of you trying to look busy), they can watch a recording of you debugging a real issue and pause/rewind as needed.
The terminal output gets captured on the server side (since that's where the session actually runs). We stream it to S3 in real-time, so if someone's laptop dies mid-session, the recording survives.
Recordings are stored per session and show up in the project dashboard. You can skim through the timeline, and there's a text search (find that error message you saw 20 minutes in).
Terminal output can contain... a lot. API keys, passwords, internal URLs, that curl command with your AWS credentials in the URL. So recording is off by default. You have to explicitly turn it on per session.
There's also a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+R) to pause/resume recording if you're about to type something sensitive. And for Enterprise customers, we can auto-redact common patterns (API keys, credit card numbers) before anything gets stored.
Two things in the works:
Async sharing. Right now if you want to share a recording, you have to be on the same CodeSync team. We're adding the ability to generate a shareable link (with expiration, obviously).
SVG exports. Someone asked if they could export a recording as an animated SVG for documentation. It's a weird use case but actually cool — you could show a "how to deploy" tutorial right in your docs. Kind of like asciinema but built into the editor. We're building it.
Terminal recording is available on Pro and Enterprise plans. Upgrade here or start a free trial — no credit card needed.