gifgrep

What This Skill Does

The gifgrep skill is a powerful command-line and terminal UI tool designed to streamline the process of finding, downloading, and extracting information from animated GIFs. It integrates with popular GIF providers like Tenor and Giphy, allowing users to search for GIFs based on keywords. Beyond simple searching, gifgrep offers an interactive Text User Interface (TUI) for browsing search results, enabling users to preview GIFs directly within their terminal. The skill supports downloading selected GIFs to a user-specified location, typically the Downloads folder. Furthermore, it provides functionality to extract still frames or create "sheets" (a grid of sampled frames) from downloaded GIFs. These extracted stills and sheets are invaluable for quick visual reviews, documentation, or sharing in various communication platforms. The skill is highly configurable, allowing users to specify GIF sources, output formats (including JSON for programmatic access), and even tweak preview rendering. It supports advanced features like still frame extraction at specific timestamps and sheet generation with customizable frame counts and grid layouts.

Installation

To install the gifgrep skill, use the following command in your Claw environment:

clawhub install openclaw/openclaw/skills/gifgrep

Ensure you have the necessary API keys for GIF providers if you intend to use them beyond the default or demo keys. For Giphy, the GIPHY_API_KEY environment variable is required. For Tenor, an API key is optional, as a demo key is used if none is provided.

Use Cases

• Content Creators & Social Media Managers: Quickly find and download relevant GIFs for social media posts, presentations, or marketing materials.
• Developers & Designers: Extract specific frames or create visual sheets from GIFs for documentation, bug reporting (e.g., illustrating an animation issue), or design previews.
• Researchers & Educators: Generate visual aids or example frames from GIFs for educational content or research papers.
• Anyone needing to share animated content: A quick and efficient way to find, preview, and share GIFs without leaving the terminal.
• Automated Workflows: Utilize the JSON output for programmatic integration into other scripts or applications, fetching GIF URLs or metadata automatically.

Example Prompts

1. "Search for funny cat GIFs, show me the top 3 results as URLs."
2. "Open the TUI and search for 'happy dance' GIFs."
3. "Download the GIF for 'coding success' and show me a still image from 2 seconds in."

Tips & Limitations

• API Keys: Remember to set GIPHY_API_KEY and/or TENOR_API_KEY environment variables for full access to respective providers.
• Terminal Preview: Still previews (--thumbs) are currently limited to Kitty and Ghostty terminal emulators.
• Output Formats: The --json and --format flags are excellent for integrating gifgrep into automated workflows. Use jq to parse JSON output effectively.
• Download Location: Downloads default to ~/Downloads. Use --reveal to quickly open the last downloaded file in your system's file browser.
• Performance: Software animation (GIFGREP_SOFTWARE_ANIM=1) can be enabled for compatibility if hardware rendering has issues, but it may impact performance.
• Rate Limits: Be mindful of potential API rate limits imposed by GIF providers, especially with frequent or extensive searches.
• File Size: Downloading large GIFs can consume bandwidth and storage. Use --max to limit the number of results downloaded.