ytfzf - Youtube from the terminal

Because I can't stand ads and tracking, I was used to use FreeTube as a Youtube client. FreeTube is an electron application, so its massively bloated. But otherwise it has all the features I need. Unfortunately it only supports youtube-dl and that's very slow on my end so the videos buffer often.

Now I've found 'ytfzf', the "Youtube fuzzy finder". You can search videos on the terminal and watch them with mpv. It even displays thumbnails in the terminal with ueberzug!

ytfzf Github repository (www)

It's already available in a lot of distributions and if not it can easily be installed from the git repo. After all it's only a (posix) shell script.

It can be configured to use yt-dlp instead of youtube-dl and the buffering issue is gone. I exported my YT subscriptions from FreeTube and extracted the channel URLs from the file to use them with ytfzf - no problem.

It even has a watch history, but I couldn't get it to work reliably. I need to investigate that further. A search history is also available.

After getting used to it a little I only use ytfzf now to follow my subscribed channels and search for videos. Its really easy if set up correctly. I'm not interested in Youtube "trends" or "recommendations", but I'm sure you can access them with ytfzf as well.

A big thumbs up to the developers - If you are a commandline nerd it's definitely worth a look!

All in all - have fun!

-fab-

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