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Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux

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Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux

#1

Post by ravachol »

Hi HN,

I created kew, a music player for the Linux terminal.

This started when I asked myself: what if I could just type something like "play nirvana" in the terminal and have the rest taken care of automatically? That got the ball rolling and I kept adding stuff: covers in ascii and then as sixel images, a playlist view, a visualizer, a library view and finally search.

While kew can be used as a commandline tool, it has evolved into a TUI app.

Here are some example commands:

kew nirvana # Plays all of your Nirvana songs, shuffled

kew nevermind # Plays the "Nevermind" album in order

kew spirit # Plays "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

kew all # Plays all your music, shuffled

kew albums # Plays one album after the other in random order

It works best when your music library is organized like this: Artist/Album(s)/Track(s)

kew is written in C and licensed under GPLv2.

Source and screenshot: https://github.com/ravachol/kew

Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux
github.com

Re: Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux

#8

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

It's is pretty cool, I can feel the energy poured into making your personal computing experience more seamless! Though the first thing I wondered when reading your examples is "how is ambiguity resolved?". Like albums, artists and tracks having the same string or sharing a prefix (search in this specific order, I guess?); or artists having the exact same name.

The aspect I like the most is using the filesystem as a database, since that's what UNIX people should like (and you can use symlinks for more complex cases). In fact, I myself made a music player with that as central philosophy, though it is much more bare/suckless compared to yours: https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus

Did you consider implementing a simple event system (maybe even IPC) for track and status change? Possibly MPRIS or something simpler. That was the main feature I kept from cmus when creating mus, so that I can easily interact with it through lemonbar and scripts.

Re: Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux

#9

Post by ravachol »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #8

It's is pretty cool, I can feel the energy poured into making your personal computing experience more seamless! Though the first thing I wondered when reading your examples is "how is ambiguity resolved?". Like albums, artists and tracks having the same string or sharing a prefix (search in this specific order, I guess?); or artists having the exact same name. The aspect I like the most is using the filesystem as a d…

Thank you. To answer your first question, ambiguity isn't resolved unfortunately. When the album has the same name as the artist for instance, I have sometimes resorted to renaming the album name by adding "album" to it. You can however get an exact search by adding -e so that resolves some problems.

Yes, MPRIS is supported.

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