A while ago we talked to you about ytfzf, a YouTube client that we could enjoy from the terminal. The final version arrived in January of this year 2024, and they are not going to update the tool anymore. The problem is that, as it is, it does not support Wayland very well, but today I have found a great alternative named YT-X. You only need to take a look at the header screenshot to realize that this is something special.
Now, keep in mind that Its development has just begun, as they say. It was introduced to the world on October 6th with version v0.1.0, and just four days ago we received the most recent v0.3.0. Once the software is installed and started, we will see what is in the image above, many options to choose what we want to do. And it doesn't lack anything.
YT-X: The Best Command Line YouTube Client?
The menus that are shown after starting include, currently in English:
- Your Feed.
- Trends.
- Playlists.
- Search, which would perhaps be better placed at the very top.
- See later.
- Your subscription feed.
- Channels.
- Custom lists.
- Videos we've marked as liked.
- Viewing history.
- Clips
- Configuration.
YT-X It is mostly written in Shell. Requires several dependencies: jq, curl, yt-dlp, fzf, mPV y ffmpeg. Some of the list remind us a lot of ytfzf, and YT-X in general does too.
The videos are not played on the terminal, but We will view them in MPV, the best video player that exists, which is not very popular because its window shows almost no controls. For this reason, we published a few weeks ago the MPV cheat sheet. If we want YT-X to display images, it can be installed flat, invention o imgcatAnd with gum we will improve the user interface. These are optional dependencies.
Regarding its operation, you only need to know English and access the menus. There is detailed information to achieve certain behaviors in your GitHub page.
Roadmap and installation
There is still a lot to be done on the roadmap, such as adding the functionality to give Like or subscribe to a channel.
To install YT-X, you only need to use one of these commands:
Last release:
curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Benexl/yt-x/refs/tags/0.3.0/yt-x" -o ~/.local/bin/yt-x && chmod +x ~/ .local/bin/yt-x
Development version:
curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Benexl/yt-x/refs/heads/master/yt-x" -o ~/.local/bin/yt-x && chmod +x ~/.local /bin/yt-x
Dependencies will have to be installed manually with APT, pacman, DNF or the distribution's package installer. Users of Arch Linux and derivatives can install YT-X from AUR.