Layers - Create beautiful animated code snippet videos for free
Layers is a free web-based tool that empowers anyone to create beautiful, animated code snippet videos. Inspired by sites like Carbon, Layers features a customizable code editor, support for popular languages, various aspect ratios, and texture super sampling for high-resolution animations.
With Layers, you can also adjust the orientation and perspective of your code snippets, allowing for dramatic compositions that can be used for more advanced editing, motion graphics, and content creation.
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Magic Translate
Hello again!
I built Layers to solve a problem I often face in video editing (especially for tech-related content) - having to screen-cap code editors or animating them from scratch.
Screen-capping is quick, but requires manual typing (which comes with a lot of retries). Traditional motion graphics approach (like After Effects) is high-fidelity but comes with a steep learning curve (an lots of time!). I built Layers to empower anyone to produce high-fidelity, animated code snippets in a matter of seconds.
Layers gives you control over the code editor style, handles the animation of typing code (characters per second and delay), and gives you background colour options depending on your use case (keying, cropping, or quick posting to social).
Layers is free, and will always be free.
I plan to add features over time, but would love to hear from others how I might be able to improve the overall utility. Right now, Layers is designed for desktops, as I figured that is where the majority of this kind of work is done, but if there is interest in a mobile version I will put it on the roadmap :)
Beautiful work@sebastianko. Massive congrats on the launch!
This is going to help immensely with my tech content creation, where most of my value delivery is visual. I've already tried a couple of use cases on your app, and I'm genuinely loving the Code Editor and Gemini Prompt styles, they look polished right out of the box.
The fact that it's free forever is honestly the cherry on top. Thank you for building this. 🙌
Suggestion for the roadmap: it would be amazing to have a Tweet-style preset that renders posts in their actual format. That single addition would unlock a huge use case for content repurposing for creators.
Magic Translate
@anandkparmar thank you! When you say tweet-style preset, are you referring to the export dimensions/aspect ratio?
beautiful
Magic Translate
@madalina_barbu thank you!
Rendering animated code snippets with consistent syntax highlighting across multiple themes while keeping file sizes reasonable is genuinely non-trivial. We've used Carbon for static previews in docs but always hit a wall when we needed motion for demos. Is the animation rendering Canvas-based or CSS-driven? And how are you handling the export encoding pipeline to keep file sizes small?
Easy and nice to generate videos, I was always using static code snippets to share some code. One small thing I'd add is allowing to modify the angles typing it in the number, it would be easier to change to a specific angle if needed
Magic Translate
@matheusdsantosr_dev that's a good point. Right now, you can specify precise slide values by using arrow keys (but it isnt very intuitive to do that). Will add that feature!
This is really useful for YouTube creators who make coding tutorials — animated snippets look way better than static screenshots. Does it support exporting as GIF or only MP4?
Magic Translate
@ravishankarai_official right now it only supports MP4 and WebM (which you can set in the recording configuration). I will explore adding GIF export as well.