ytp - A super light command-line client for YouTube

I’ve been using youtube-viewer for a long time now and it’s a great command-line client for YouTube. It’s packed with features that allow you to use pretty much every feature possible on YouTube, but it comes at a price; the footprint.

On Gentoo Linux I needed to emerge a total of 42 packages for youtube-viewer, most are small, but still.. 42 packages. And I don’t even use 99% of the features anyway, I just want to be able to search and play videos without having to use YouTube’s hideously bloated and malicious website which tracks my every move.

Just recently, I found out about a super light and basic client called ytp via HexDSL on Mastodon. It’s written in Bash and the only dependency it needs is jq, which is a lightweight command-line JSON processor.

Installation

The only dependency you need to install is jq and after that you can clone the repository with git, make the script executable and run it:

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/uoou/ytp

$ cd ytp && chmox +x ytp

$ ./ytp "<search word>"

And as always, I advise you to put the script in your $PATH for easy access.