4,866 stars · MIT (read from /blob/main/LICENSE, plain unmodified text, "Copyright (c) 2024 Charmbracelet, Inc") · v0.2.2 (2025-04-01; the GitHub page shows "01 Apr" with no year and the year was settled TWICE, by pkg.go.dev and by the ungh releases mirror — so the newest release is eighteen months old while code was pushed 2026-09-16) · Track this in Scout
Makes a clean image of code or terminal output from the command line, with syntax colouring.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
freeze takes a file, or the output of a command, and writes a PNG, WebP or SVG of it with syntax colouring and optional window decoration. It is from the same group that makes the terminal tools vhs and gum.
What it is good for. Anyone who writes documentation, posts about code, teaches, or files bug reports with a snippet in them. It replaces the habit of taking a photo of a terminal window.
- MIT, read from the file at
/blob/main/LICENSE, plain and unmodified, "Copyright (c) 2024 Charmbracelet, Inc". - It installs from Homebrew, Arch, Nix, and as a plain downloaded binary, with Debian and RPM packages too. No runtime to install first if you take the binary.
- Code was pushed on 16 September 2026, three weeks before this edition.
- The newest release, v0.2.2, is dated 1 April 2025 — eighteen months old. The date carries no year on the GitHub page; it was settled twice, against pkg.go.dev and against the ungh mirror. The project is not dead. The downloadable binary is simply a year and a half behind the code, and the only way to get the newer code is
go install, which needs a Go toolchain. - Making a PNG needs fonts present and a working terminal environment. On a server with no desktop, font rendering surprises are common, and no memory or disk figure is published.
- 49 open issues and 29 open pull requests on a small team.
- carbon-app/carbon
The browser page that made this idea popular; prettier output, but you paste into a web form instead of running a command, so it cannot go in a script.
Track this in Scout - Aloxaf/silicon
The same job in Rust, rendering fonts itself rather than relying on the system, but it has taken no code since 26 September 2024.
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charmbracelet/vhsThe moving version from the same authors: a script of keystrokes becomes an animated GIF of a terminal session.
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brew install charmbracelet/tap/freeze go install github.com/charmbracelet/freeze@latest yay -S freeze nix-env -iA nixpkgs.charm-freeze
