Recording Animated GIFs with Peek on Debian 10 Buster

If you want to extract gif from any video without a lot of video editing experience, Peek should be your tool. It is a very simple screen recorder with an easy to use interface. Peek makes it easy to create short screencasts for an area of the screen. It was created for the specific use case of screen recording, for example to easily display the UI functionality of your own applications, or to display an error in error reporting. With Peek, you simply place the Peek window over the area you want to record and click Record. Peek is optimized for creating animated GIFs, but you can also directly record to WebM or MP4 if you like. Peek is not a general purpose screen sharing app with advanced features, but rather focuses on the sole task of creating small silent videos in the screen area to create GIF animations or silent WebM or MP4 videos.

In this article, we will describe two ways to install / uninstall Peek on Debian.

Through the user interface using the Debian Software Manager
Via Debian command line terminal

We will also explain how you can write a gif file via Peek on your system.

We have followed the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on a Debian 10 Buster system.

Installation via the command line

First, open Terminal via the app launcher search bar as follows:

The next step is to update your system’s repository index with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get update

This will help you install the latest software available from the Internet.

Please note that only an authorized user can add, remove and configure software in Debian.

Then run the following command to install Peek:

$ sudo apt-get install peek

The system may prompt you to select the y / n option to proceed with the installation. Please enter Y if you want to continue with the installation. This process may take a while, depending on your internet speed, after which Peek will be installed on your system.

The following command will allow you to check the version number of your installed package, as well as verify that the software is actually installed on your system.

$ peek -v

Launch Peek

You can launch the Peek application via the command line by entering the following command:

$ peek

Remove Peek

You can use the following command in your Terminal to remove Peek from your system:

$ sudo apt-get remove peek

Enter y at the y / n prompt and the software will be completely removed from your system.

Installation via Debian Software Manager

For someone who does not want to heavily open up the command line, installing the software present in the official Debian repository via the user interface is very easy.

In the toolbar / in the Debian Desktop Activities dock, click the Debian Software icon.

Click the search icon in Software Manager and type Peek in the search bar. The search results will list matching entries as follows:

The Peek entry listed here is maintained by the main Debian Stable repository. Click this search entry to open the following view:

Click the Install button to start the installation process. The following authentication dialog will appear where you can enter your authentication credentials, since only an authorized user can install software on Debian.

Enter your password and click the “Authentication” button. The installation process will then begin with the following progress bar displayed:

After that Peek will be installed on your system and after successful installation you will receive the following message:

In the dialog above, you can choose to launch Peek directly and even uninstall it immediately for whatever reason.

Launch Peek

You can access Peek from the Debian Application Launcher as follows, or directly from the Application List:

Remove Peek

If you want to uninstall Peek that was installed in the above way, you can uninstall it from your system as follows:

Open the Debian Software Manager and find Peek. You will see the “Installed” status in the search bar. Click this entry and then click Delete in the next window:

The system will prompt you with an authentication dialog. The software will be uninstalled when you provide a password for the sudo user and click “Authenticate” in the dialog box.

Recording an animated gif with Peek

When you open Peek, it will display the previously viewed recording app like this:

In the image above, you can see that Peek is ready to record my web browser. However, this is not what I want to record. I want to create a GIF from a YouTube video. I will first open this video and then open Peek so that this video can be seen for recording.

You can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + R to start / stop recording a small video. Otherwise, you can also use the Burn as GIF button to start recording in GIF format of the current view. Other formats you can record include: