Of course you should be able to make animated GIFs in Emacs

I was wondering what a convenient production process for GIFs from movies would be like, so I hacked my hacked version of mplayer a bit more.  Nothing major, since it already has all the functionality, but it doesn’t group continuous screenshots by name, which makes picking out the animations afterwards awkward.

There’s probably a gazillion GIF editors out there already, but since the things you typically want to do with an animation (trim start/end, adjust speed and how many frames to skip) are kinda trivial, it seemed more convenient to just write a mode in Emacs.  So I did.

It uses the ImageMagick “convert” command to actually stitch the images together in the end after you’ve done the edit, so it’s not a pure Emacs-only solution.

And here’s the result:

I’m sure this is going to turn out to be really useful some day!