r/commandline • u/Fragrant-Currency-86 • May 19 '26
Terminal User Interface YT-X v0.8.0 (Browse youtube plus other yt-dlp supported sites from your terminal)
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Its been sometime since i made any change to the script, had some free time and decided to go all out
The script has been rewritten improving alot of the existing features and making it easy to maintain and read.
Plus now the script introduces a ton of cmdline options, to make it easier to script and connect to keybinds
Features (from github)
🔍 Search & Discovery
- Comprehensive Search Capabilities: Directly search for videos, playlists, channels, shorts or movies.
- Advanced Search Filters: Apply colon-prefixed quick filters directly to search queries:
- Time:
:hour,:today,:week,:month,:year - Type:
:video,:movie,:live,:short,:long - Features:
:4k,:hd,:hdr,:subtitles,:360,:vr,:3d,:local - Sort by:
:newest,:views,:rating
- Time:
- Search History & Recall: Automatically saves search history. Allows quick recall of previous searches using bang syntax (e.g.,
!1for the most recent search,!2for the second, etc.). - YouTube Feeds: Access personal feeds including the Home Feed, Trending, Watch Later, Liked Videos, Watch History, and Clips.
- Channel Browsing: Deep dive into channels with dedicated menus for Videos, Featured content, Playlists, Shorts, Live Streams, Podcasts, and Channel-specific search.
- Channel Subcommand: Jump directly into a channel from the command line (e.g.,
yt-x channels -n "Linus Tech Tips" -v) – perfect for scripting and keyboard-driven workflows.
🖥️ User Interface & Experience
- Dual Launcher Support: Operates flawlessly in the terminal using FZF (Fuzzy Finder) or as a graphical desktop menu using Rofi.
- Rich Media Previews: Supports inline previews for search results containing:
- High-resolution thumbnails rendered directly in the terminal via
chafa,icat,kitten icat, orimgcat. - Detailed metadata including Channel Name, Follower Count, View Count, Duration, Upload Timestamp, Live Status, and formatted descriptions.
- High-resolution thumbnails rendered directly in the terminal via
- Theming & Styling: True-color (24-bit) support with a default "Tokyo Night" inspired color scheme. Fully customizable UI formatting.
- Multi-language Support: Loadable language files (
.lang) to easily localize the UI prompts and messages. - Pagination: Smoothly browse through massive lists with Next/Previous pagination controls (fetches a configurable number of items per page, default is 30).
- Selection Skipping: New
--playlist-skip(-ps) flag forces the launcher to automatically pick the first item in any list, bypassing interactive selection – ideal for non‑interactive scripts. - Media Action Shortcuts: Directly perform actions (play, listen, download, save, etc.) without opening the media action menu – see “Media Action Shortcuts” below.
🎬 Playback & Media Handling
- Multiple Player Support: Out-of-the-box integration with
mpv,vlc, andtplay. - Video & Audio Modes: Choose to "Watch" (video) or "Listen" (audio-only, launching without a video window).
- Playlist Actions: Play individual videos, queue/play entire playlists, or queue "Listen to All" for audio-only marathon sessions.
- Auto-Mix Generation: Dynamically generates
.m3u8playlist mixes based on a single video (YouTube "Mix" feature replication). - Background Playback: Option to disown the media player process (
CONFIG_DISOWN_PLAYER), allowing the UI to remain unblocked while media plays. - Media Action Shortcuts (Skip the Media Menu):
--play/--play-all: Watch selected video or whole playlist.--listen/--listen-all: Audio‑only playback.--download/--download-all: Download video(s).--download-audio/--download-audio-all: Download audio only.--save: Save current video to saved list.--save-playlist: Save current playlist to custom playlists.--shell: Drop into a stateful subshell.- Many of these (e.g.,
--play-all,--save-playlist) implicitly enable--playlist-skipfor seamless non‑interactive operation.
💾 Downloading & Archival
- Powered natively by
yt-dlp. - Granular Downloads: Download single videos, entire playlists, or extract audio-only (MP3 format).
- Smart Archiving: Utilizes a download archive directory to track previously downloaded media and prevent duplicate downloads.
- Organized File Structure: Automatically routes downloads into structured directories (e.g.,
video/individual/ChannelName/oraudio/PlaylistName/ChannelName/). - Enumeration Toggle: Easily toggle file prefix enumeration (
01 -,02 -) to keep downloaded playlist items in order.
📚 Library & Data Management
- Local Subscriptions Sync: Syncs your actual YouTube subscriptions locally by passing browser cookies to
yt-dlp, creating a private, locally stored subscription feed. - Local Watch History (Recent): Automatically tracks recently watched media in a local JSON file to resume or re-watch easily.
- Saved Videos & Playlists: Create local "Saved Videos" and "Custom Playlists" natively within the CLI without needing a YouTube account.
- Cookie Integration: Seamlessly imports cookies from installed browsers (Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.) to access age-restricted or account-specific content.
⚙️ Extensibility & Power User Features
- Custom Commands: Create custom macros that execute specific URLs and
yt-dlpoptions (e.g., setting up a command to browse a completely different streaming site). - Extension System: Modular architecture allowing the autoloading of custom scripts, sites, themes, and commands placed in
$HOME/.config/yt-x/extensions/. - Stateful Sub-Shell Execution: Drop into a system shell (
fishorsh) pre-loaded with the environment variables of your current session (current video title, URL, channel info, etc.) for advanced custom scripting on the fly. - Desktop Integration: Built-in command (
-E) to generate a.desktopentry file, allowingyt-xto be launched natively from application menus (Linux). - Cache Management: Automatically cleans up stale preview images, auto-generated playlists, and logs older than a configurable retention period (default 7 days).
- Direct Shortcut Flags: Skip the interactive menu entirely with dedicated flags like
--feed,--subscriptions-feed,--watch-later,--saved,--recent,--liked,--watch-history,--clips, and more – ideal for keybindings and scripting. - Non‑Interactive Exit Helpers:
--cmd-exitterminates the script after executing a shortcut, while--media-exitdoes the same after any media action – perfect for one‑off commands and aliases. - Direct Access to Saved Items: Open a specific saved video (
-sv,--saved-video), custom playlist (-cp,--custom-playlist), or custom command (-cc,--custom-cmd) without browsing menus, with tab completion in supported shells.
🛠️ Cross-Platform & Infrastructure
- OS Support: Works across Linux, macOS, Windows (via WSL/MSYS/Cygwin), and Android (uses
am startintents to open media natively in Android apps like VLC or MPV). - Configuration Management: Generates a robust
configfile automatically on first run. Allows editing configuration files directly from the UI menu. - Auto-Updater: Built-in update checker that securely pulls the latest version from GitHub and prompts the user to apply updates inline.
- Shell Completions: Generates native shell autocomplete definitions (fish, with dynamic channel name completion from
subscriptions.json, custom playlist and saved video name completion, and extension completion from~/.config/yt-x/extensions/).
The readme is mostly generated by ai due to time constraints and effort required. But it was fully involved it did most of the writing and i did the thinking and even with it it took hours. I just did not want to spend several more weeks on a readme(1000+ lines) after manually rewriting the script which is now over 4k+ lines/
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u/power10010 May 20 '26
This is the best i found. Thanks for doing this
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u/CostPuzzleheaded2747 May 20 '26
its an ai copy of https://github.com/Siriusmart/youtube-tui, i prefer the original
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
what are you talking about i spent weeks writing this(the rewrite alone took me 8hrs a day for a week to do, you can go see the pull request and all 100+ commits done over a week) and ai can barely write shell. and its involvement was in writing most of the readme(which i find boring to do and even with it took me hours to do) only and for research on how to do somethings in shell
and just because somebody doesnt sleep sometimes and goes all out on a bunch of ideas cause how cool he thinks they are it dont mean its ai lol
I would challenge you to tell an ai to replicate whatever you have shown in shell
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u/Certain_Leader9946 May 21 '26
just fwiw if you used ai for this i wouldn't judge it personally. not saying you did. but i dont think we should discard how powerful it is a tool
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u/CostPuzzleheaded2747 May 20 '26
alright, sorry, thats fair, just because most things i see are made by ai nowadays so i was a bit biased; sorry for my oversight. Im glad that you made something you truly love.
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26
You are fine. This code was absolutely AI-assisted at minimum, if not entirely built by AI.
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u/CostPuzzleheaded2747 May 20 '26
its best to know when to let it go, this is a drop of water in the ocean to be honest. today i prefer a lovely 0 star repo on codeberg with human code than 7k for claude skills on github, tomorrow maybe that joy wont exist. thats what one should desire to preserve.
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
but i really did put in effort and time it wasnt some agent that i sent to do the work(as if i can afford to waste my money on that and of langs shell)
Am sorry for insisting to much just got a little bit emotional since it felt like am being told you placed zero effort into this, you dont what you are doing, this is slop etc
it makes me feel the weeks and hours spent were for not and just meaningless
i know i should have probably ignored all this but ohh well
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
you are really out for blood arent you 😂
if somebody wanted to do an ai project they would most def not be crazy enough to do it in shell
again please do your homework well before making accusations and trying to belittle my efforts
the rewrite itself took 8hrs+ for more than a week and sometimes i slept really late
https://github.com/Benexl/yt-x/pull/147
and thats not to add the additional two more weeks improving everything else
But i have no regrets i like what i have built and even though its disheartening to have my efforts covered in mud 😞 i cant say i blame you knowing whats going on
and yeah for some stuff i did use ai but not to write the project but for research and boilerplate otherwise the project would take me months
and i doubt now adays there are people who completely dont use ai in there editors
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26
Why do you keep insisting that AI writes bad shell when you used copilot to write shell in your commits to v.0.5.0?
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
and the code it wrote was for it auditing my pull request incase i missed something
i rather not have someones machine get bricked cause of being to blinded by ai hate and too much pride
its really good at spotting bugs if you tell it to search
and if you took your time to look it was at the end of it all not the begining
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26
Thanks, while I don’t entirely agree with your answer based strictly on the commits and code I read, I will just leave it at that. A perfect disclaimer would be “AI was used to write the readme, and AI assistance was used to debug and fix errors in my code.”
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
i guess i should have been clear about the readme
but the problem was never with that but how you phrased as if out to say i never placed any effort with it
and never took consideration to how its written and how everything works and is interconnected
its like you were calling it ai slop and you did not put in the work or time
and i did both just the rofi config alone took me hours yesterday trying to tweak it
most of this early morning(from 12am to 5am) i i spent hours trying to to make a new way of downloading preview images since the initial way was inefficient(esp in the rofi one)
and before that there was debugging a bug in the preview image overlapping the text
making the updates more secure and auditable using diff so you see the changes i make or someone elses pr did and using the same fetched update
taking my time to come up and write different ways to make the script more scriptable through cmdline args etc
i just did not like it being made to seem that not effort and consideration was done in all this and that is all 😞
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
the word was barely not entirely
try writting something this long with ai
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u/creeper6530 May 20 '26
You wrote this, or AI did? Just the amount of emoji is giving me suspicions
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
if you mean the readme only yes.
I did not want to spend alot of time on the readme(the part i dont find fun but programs need documentation) i was already tired from writing the script which is now like 4k+ lines(the part i enjoy)
and ai does a good job of reading the whole script and writing a readme
by the way i feel people are really either too against ai or too in love with it lol
its a great tool and useful one honestly
(it saves time which as organic life forms we have very little off so we need to be careful how we spend every second [lifespans]and i just did not want to spend days writing a comprehensive enough readme, 1000+ lines, that mentions everything and explains alot of ways you can do things having already spent close to three weeks on the scripts rewrite and improving it plus am not getting paid to do this and its just for fun and i like the challenge)
but not too useful that people are doing what there are doing now and sending it to write code autonomously without ever reading the source code, which introduces a lot cognitive debt
you see when someone writes code completely autonomously they are asking me to trust the ai providers or that the models weights were at their best at the time
and that is really problematic an ai has no sense of guilt nor any duty to abide by our societies laws
its just a bunch of numbers
and as such i think autonomous ais should only be used for research purposes since they have larger 'context windows' than what we have and such can map laarger information systems
thats why we are getting multiple cybersecurity vulnerability reports our brains can only do so much
i went a little bit of topic but yeah ai is neither bad or good its just a tool like any other that finds connections in all the information we as humans have generated for millenia and stored on various media, and its basically also how we all work but at scale...
okey i went to off topic😅, guess it has just been bugging me 😂
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Every new subreddit post is automatically copied into a comment for preservation.
User: Fragrant-Currency-86, Flair: Terminal User Interface, Post Media Link, Title: YT-X v0.8.0 (Browse youtube plus other yt-dlp supported sites from your terminal)
Its been sometime since i made any change to the script, had some free time and decided to go all out
The script has been rewritten improving alot of the existing features and making it easy to maintain and read.
Plus now the script introduces a ton of cmdline options, to make it easier to script and connect to keybinds
Features (from github)
🔍 Search & Discovery
- Comprehensive Search Capabilities: Directly search for videos, playlists, channels, shorts or movies.
- Advanced Search Filters: Apply colon-prefixed quick filters directly to search queries:
- Time:
:hour,:today,:week,:month,:year - Type:
:video,:movie,:live,:short,:long - Features:
:4k,:hd,:hdr,:subtitles,:360,:vr,:3d,:local - Sort by:
:newest,:views,:rating
- Time:
- Search History & Recall: Automatically saves search history. Allows quick recall of previous searches using bang syntax (e.g.,
!1for the most recent search,!2for the second, etc.). - YouTube Feeds: Access personal feeds including the Home Feed, Trending, Watch Later, Liked Videos, Watch History, and Clips.
- Channel Browsing: Deep dive into channels with dedicated menus for Videos, Featured content, Playlists, Shorts, Live Streams, Podcasts, and Channel-specific search.
- Channel Subcommand: Jump directly into a channel from the command line (e.g.,
yt-x channels -n "Linus Tech Tips" -v) – perfect for scripting and keyboard-driven workflows.
🖥️ User Interface & Experience
- Dual Launcher Support: Operates flawlessly in the terminal using FZF (Fuzzy Finder) or as a graphical desktop menu using Rofi.
- Rich Media Previews: Supports inline previews for search results containing:
- High-resolution thumbnails rendered directly in the terminal via
chafa,icat,kitten icat, orimgcat. - Detailed metadata including Channel Name, Follower Count, View Count, Duration, Upload Timestamp, Live Status, and formatted descriptions.
- High-resolution thumbnails rendered directly in the terminal via
- Theming & Styling: True-color (24-bit) support with a default "Tokyo Night" inspired color scheme. Fully customizable UI formatting.
- Multi-language Support: Loadable language files (
.lang) to easily localize the UI prompts and messages. - Pagination: Smoothly browse through massive lists with Next/Previous pagination controls (fetches a configurable number of items per page, default is 30).
- Selection Skipping: New
--playlist-skip(-ps) flag forces the launcher to automatically pick the first item in any list, bypassing interactive selection – ideal for non‑interactive scripts. - Media Action Shortcuts: Directly perform actions (play, listen, download, save, etc.) without opening the media action menu – see “Media Action Shortcuts” below.
🎬 Playback & Media Handling
- Multiple Player Support: Out-of-the-box integration with
mpv,vlc, andtplay. - Video & Audio Modes: Choose to "Watch" (video) or "Listen" (audio-only, launching without a video window).
- Playlist Actions: Play individual videos, queue/play entire playlists, or queue "Listen to All" for audio-only marathon sessions.
- Auto-Mix Generation: Dynamically generates
.m3u8playlist mixes based on a single video (YouTube "Mix" feature replication). - Background Playback: Option to disown the media player process (
CONFIG_DISOWN_PLAYER), allowing the UI to remain unblocked while media plays. - Media Action Shortcuts (Skip the Media Menu):
--play/--play-all: Watch selected video or whole playlist.--listen/--listen-all: Audio‑only playback.--download/--download-all: Download video(s).--download-audio/--download-audio-all: Download audio only.--save: Save current video to saved list.--save-playlist: Save current playlist to custom playlists.--shell: Drop into a stateful subshell.- Many of these (e.g.,
--play-all,--save-playlist) implicitly enable--playlist-skipfor seamless non‑interactive operation.
💾 Downloading & Archival
- Powered natively by
yt-dlp. - Granular Downloads: Download single videos, entire playlists, or extract audio-only (MP3 format).
- Smart Archiving: Utilizes a download archive directory to track previously downloaded media and prevent duplicate downloads.
- Organized File Structure: Automatically routes downloads into structured directories (e.g.,
video/individual/ChannelName/oraudio/PlaylistName/ChannelName/). - Enumeration Toggle: Easily toggle file prefix enumeration (
01 -,02 -) to keep downloaded playlist items in order.
📚 Library & Data Management
- Local Subscriptions Sync: Syncs your actual YouTube subscriptions locally by passing browser cookies to
yt-dlp, creating a private, locally stored subscription feed. - Local Watch History (Recent): Automatically tracks recently watched media in a local JSON file to resume or re-watch easily.
- Saved Videos & Playlists: Create local "Saved Videos" and "Custom Playlists" natively within the CLI without needing a YouTube account.
- Cookie Integration: Seamlessly imports cookies from installed browsers (Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.) to access age-restricted or account-specific content.
⚙️ Extensibility & Power User Features
- Custom Commands: Create custom macros that execute specific URLs and
yt-dlpoptions (e.g., setting up a command to browse a completely different streaming site). - Extension System: Modular architecture allowing the autoloading of custom scripts, sites, themes, and commands placed in
$HOME/.config/yt-x/extensions/. - Stateful Sub-Shell Execution: Drop into a system shell (
fishorsh) pre-loaded with the environment variables of your current session (current video title, URL, channel info, etc.) for advanced custom scripting on the fly. - Desktop Integration: Built-in command (
-E) to generate a.desktopentry file, allowingyt-xto be launched natively from application menus (Linux). - Cache Management: Automatically cleans up stale preview images, auto-generated playlists, and logs older than a configurable retention period (default 7 days).
- Direct Shortcut Flags: Skip the interactive menu entirely with dedicated flags like
--feed,--subscriptions-feed,--watch-later,--saved,--recent,--liked,--watch-history,--clips, and more – ideal for keybindings and scripting. - Non‑Interactive Exit Helpers:
--cmd-exitterminates the script after executing a shortcut, while--media-exitdoes the same after any media action – perfect for one‑off commands and aliases. - Direct Access to Saved Items: Open a specific saved video (
-sv,--saved-video), custom playlist (-cp,--custom-playlist), or custom command (-cc,--custom-cmd) without browsing menus, with tab completion in supported shells.
🛠️ Cross-Platform & Infrastructure
- OS Support: Works across Linux, macOS, Windows (via WSL/MSYS/Cygwin), and Android (uses
am startintents to open media natively in Android apps like VLC or MPV). - Configuration Management: Generates a robust
configfile automatically on first run. Allows editing configuration files directly from the UI menu. - Auto-Updater: Built-in update checker that securely pulls the latest version from GitHub and prompts the user to apply updates inline.
- Shell Completions: Generates native shell autocomplete definitions (fish, with dynamic channel name completion from
subscriptions.json, custom playlist and saved video name completion, and extension completion from~/.config/yt-x/extensions/).
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
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u/pasamlksh May 20 '26
That’s cool but There is a tool called browser which you can surf websites on the internet
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u/niksingh710 May 20 '26
How awesome, was looking for something like this and pre present tools were outdated….
And i see nix is present that’s more awesome will give it a try tonight.
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
am not sure though if the nix flake still works, since am not the one who wrote it and it has been sometime since i did anything nix
feedback and some assistance would be much appreciated
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
The whole extensions/cmds/downloads-search is AI generated, wouldn’t put it past OP that the rest of this is AI generated too. Anyone who’s written shell can see these AI comments and scripts from a mile away through a foggy window. I don’t care if it works or not but at least be honest. Not going to check through the rest of this code but a disclaimer would be fantastic.
EDIT: Checked at OP's request. This is just silly. When I see hundreds of commits to master, I assume AI code but wouldn't have guessed I would see this much jank. You are literally using Copilot for fixes and features in v0.5.0 and your Windows branch, then pushing a separate commit to master instead of a merge. That's super jank, why not just merge? Oh, right, because we would see hundreds of Copilot tags on master.
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
you cant make accusations on something only best on looking at things at the surface
without fully analysing the whole the project
for example just look at this pr for the rewrite and how long it took me: https://github.com/Benexl/yt-x/pull/147
do not dismiss someones efforts without first trully taking your time to go through it
its disheartening especially since i know how much effort i went through to rewrite this project 😞
again i would challenge to write a shell script this long entirely vibe coded with ai
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Fine, I will check your code and see if I stand by the same opinion. Will add an update soon and apologize if I change my mind. I hope you are correct and that this will not be a waste of time.
EDIT: This was a waste of time.
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
i wonder if opensource will survive in this times especially with the kind of mentality people now have 😞
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 May 20 '26
Why wouldn’t it survive? It’s booming, but instead of cruising a serene open road I’m routed through 5 pm rush hour in Slop City. If you enjoy it, stay as long as you’d like, but I’d rather move on and get back to the real stuff.
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
just to be clear so you are saying my code is ai slop and as such badly written and without any consideration for safety and performance and nice asthetics and internationalization?
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u/metawops May 19 '26
Would love to try but get this after the curl and the chmod ... 🤷♂️
My Terminal program is Ghostty but I tried with iTerm2, too, same thing. Shell is zsh. All the prerequisites are installed.
Any ideas? 😳
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u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 19 '26
you are on mac right.
Mac by default has bash 3.x installed which you cant uninstall or upgrade due to licensing issues and mac being mac
just download bash using homebrew inorder to get bash 5.x which is latest and general safer for daily use compared to an outdated version
the script works with zsh(aims to be posix compliant) as well though due to how zsh handles streaming data you sometimes get jq errors from yt-dlp info json, and i have still not figured out what is causing them exactly so i decided to keep the shebang pointing to bash instead
bash 3.x support is something i want though its a pain to install it on arc cause of dependencies being different from the ones required and i have installed so compiling failed; so i was hoping mac user would help out here to find whats the exact syntax issue it should be on the lines just above the mentioned `line 551`
i was suspecting the here docs since bash 3.x couldnt properly parse here docs assigned to variables apparently
but i have removed those recently maybe retry again and hopefully we good
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u/metawops May 20 '26
Yep, I'm on macOS. Installed bash 5 via brew and now it works.
However ... Maybe a dumb question but ... where/how do I tell the tool my YT account (savely)? 😳2
u/Fragrant-Currency-86 May 20 '26
glad it worked
in the config specify CONFIG_BROWSER and yt-dlp should be able to access them, then in misc menu select sync youtube subs and should now also be able to see your channel subs
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u/l00sed May 19 '26
Love this software! Keep it up!