kew (/kjuː/, a variant of cue) is a terminal music player.

## Testimonials

Humbling praise mostly from Reddit, Github and Codeberg. Thank you all!

@LandStander27 By the way, love the app! By far the best looking player I’ve seen.

@Visual-Dawg Oh, and thank you for creating this awesome app. It looks so nice and is so good to use.

@Jonwilts Hi. Firstly - new user to kew but I absolutely love it. Really, really cool. Well done.

@the-boar Really enjoy the app btw, every other terminal based music player rubbed me the wrong way.

@BRS5672023 kew lightweight and elegant..

@anarc.at kew: surprisingly fast music player, parsed my entire library (which is huge) instantaneously and just started playing

@vdawg-git The app is awesome and I like it a lot :)

@kazemaksOG Thank you for maintaining this amazing piece of software @ravachol c:

@TimNekk I’ve been using kew for a few weeks now, and the ability to search and play music directly from the terminal has completely changed my workflow - it’s surprisingly intuitive and the gapless playback is a game-changer for listening to albums

@smeea Thanks for awesome player!

@j-lakeman gr8 app, love it, keep up the good work!

@nan0bug00 Just wanted to say thanks. This is a great little bit of software you wrote here and I really appreciate it.

@vincentcomfy I want to second this, honestly so well documented and works so well.

@amigthea thank you for this awesome project

@Visual-Dawg The app is awesome and I like it a lot :)

@buriedBug I really love the project

@NarcoMonarchist Nice app, even nicer Disco Elysium reference on your GitHub 🤘 Hardcore to the max

@love-supreme Dope

@Yamoyek This looks awesome!

@MasterpieceMuted5956 I just installed. GREAT JOB !!!!!!

@Raphael Amorim Hey @ravachol thank you for the amazing project, I have started to use it and really enjoying.

@echoriiku thanks for the amazing project @ravachol !

@Hefty-Cobbler-4914 Been using kew for a week. This music player is very nice. I did not have a local music library and kew has inspired me to tuck away some favourites to see how the covers encode as ASCII art. Thank you.

I used to maintain a digital music library but gave it up for streaming. I might have to dig around through storage for bandcamp codes that came with vinyl purchases over the years if I get serious about a local library again. For now I’m just enjoying marvelling at what you’ve created.

@Echinoidea Thanks for the help, and thanks for making Kew too. I love this program.

@sadlerm Installed it as soon as I saw gapless playback. Amazing app OP!

@y_shimada It looks cool, it is easy to use and I like it best.

@T8ert0t I haven’t used the app yet. I’m just here based on how thorough the documentation is. Really nice job!

@pretender shoutout the methhead who showed me kew

@nikolasdmtr I cannot stress enough how much your app ABSOLUTELY ROCKS! I have not seen anything like it, it is such a brilliant idea! I completely stopped using my Navidrome server at home because of it. Thank you so much for your work!

@PrivacyFriendlyMuff I love this piece of software. It’s beautifully minimalistic and you did a REALLY good job on it! _ Cheers!

@Sharp-Coder6989 Ever since I discovered the music player you created, I’ve started buying CDs and ripping them, or purchasing the music directly, instead of just streaming music. It has become my secret pleasure! Thank you so much.

@PrivacyFriendlyMuffins The app is fantastic! Love it!

@ThePikachuDev Finally found a good , no bs and suckless cli music player man . I am on a hunting to find best cli tools to do things : ).

@nikolasdmtr Man, I did not think I would be that impressed! I used to add radio stations to Navidrome one by one to have them available for playback. It is incredible how fast and simple it is with Kew!

@nikolasdi I recently discovered github.com/ravachol/kew . It is incredible how fast and easy I can get to listening to my music. Just type “kew” and the partial name of any artist or album and it starts playback of that album or a shuffled list on that artist! #terminal #cli #linux

@ggkazii honestly my favorite music player these days. love the command-line search features and looks better than all of the others with the ascii album art lol

@EuphoricLake7499 kew is amazing but music scrobbling is a must for me :c

@HAPPIOcrz007 i must say that the service you have made is great

@PrivacyFriendlyMuffins Love the program regardless. It’s incredible and it makes me smile. 🙂

@Chromium3Oxide Nice, I’m happy your work on kew is getting recognition! So far, I haven’t thanked you, so thank you for creating such an amazing terminal music player!

@Chromium3Oxide After I got into Linux, I also learned some C programming. I made some terminal apps, which involved ncurses and ansi codes, which is why most of my commits to kew are related to those. I wanted a good terminal music player because mpv and vlc used too much ram, and I tried cmus and mocp, but didn’t like them. Seeking back and forth on cmus and mocp was buggy for me. I eventually found kew by searching enough. Kew actually had good seeking, plus it displayed the album covers and had a cool visualizer. Kew has a small codebase (which I hope stays like this in the future), which is easier to work with and contribute to. Whenever I want to change something in kew, I can just do it, which is what makes kew and open source in general amazing. I also contribute to kew to learn more programming, I guess many open source projects are learning opportunities for their creators. I know maintaining an open source project is hard, so I try to help.

Thank you for your amazing music player.

@OMERSTOP1 omg thank you so much i was searching for it my whole life im crying so hard right now i can tell how happy i am. i always wanted a music player application like this but couldnt get it i was seeing it in my dreams always it im now in tears my whole life has changed i was about to punch some walls and start terrorism because of not being able to find it i told the music player to everyone i got a whole community crying thank you so much i was about to commit suicide because of the music player i was mentally destroyed now im crying because of happiness thats an interesting music player

@j-lakeman Thanks for this awesome application!

@MKwareContributions Thanks for this great piece of software by the way.

@AriaAzadiPour Just found kew – a tool that helps you play music in the terminal – one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Thank you

@sidney-zhu Great software, really LOVE it. Thank you.

@The Linux Cast This post explores ‘Kew’, a terminal music player that balances functionality without being overly complex. It is praised for its speed, simple interface, and ability to handle large music libraries efficiently. The player supports Vim keybindings and album art display using the Kitty image protocol. However, there are some limitations, such as sorting and playlist management. Configuration options are available for customizing keybindings.

@seongbin First, thx for your work! I love this!

@Dandelion75 I love kew, its perfect

@vredfreak (sponsor) Best Music player I’ve ever used, with good, responsive development. Well deserved.

@burnskull55 Holy jesus this is it. THE ONE I WAS LOOKING FOR. Dude you have no idea how long i wanted a local player THAT IS SIMPLE and has theese features. Thx so much.

Is it possible to add a library mode with album covers? Its the only thing im missing rn but godam this is good.

@obsolete I am surprised this player isn’t getting the recognition it deserves.

@Impossible-Context88 I fucking love kew bro, I’ve been suffering with ugly music players for TOO LONG. Thank you man for real. […] Love this music player, thank you

@affhp Thanks for creating this terminal media player that is not mpd based, which have many limitation IMO. Not so many people do that, I think it has many potential, great work.

@lamsal27 First off, thank you for maintaining kew, it’s an excellent terminal-based music player, and I really appreciate the focus on simplicity and stability.

@xploien Hello I am a quite new user here but im loving this a lot!!

@Steamymoomilk I LOVE KEW, THANKS FOR MAKING IT! ive used it for years with my CD collection and it beats out everything in comparison.

@JPSariz Hello! Just wanted to start by saying I found kew today and am in love with it! … Thank you for making such an incredible player, and for responding so blazingly fast! Kew is where my music will live from here on out. I hope you have a good day/

@PrivacyFriendlyMuffins I appreciate all your hard work! It really is a wondrous app! _

@ComradeGodzilla Checked out Kew. Cool terminal music app. Been using cmus but this one is good as well.

@Logan I love kew – thanks for all the work you put into it. It’s a great piece of software.

@Christian Mummelthey I’m always thrilled when I come across software that makes working in the shell a bit more enjoyable. Thank you for your work. I was just about to start building something myself since I couldn’t find anything suitable.

@imalee.sk Beautiful piece, glad I found it.thank you.

@reeveng And for the rest I find kew perfect, so don’t expect any more pull requests from me 😆 thanks for the effort and creating it so far!

@flashfire1001 First, thank you for developing kew! It’s a fantastic, lightweight player. I am an Arch Linux user and a big fan of this app.

@YokaiRick first thanks for making kew, i love it so much <3

@Needlide Peak piece of software. Thank you

@timbertham Well, my only contribution for now is kew as a terminal music player. S tier thing.

@thegobimahato Playing music in Terminal feels cool 😎.

@alejandrobdn@social.linux.pizza Trying out kew, a music player for the CLI. For the first time, I’ve found a player for the Linux terminal that I don’t have to spend time configuring and that works right out of the box.

@kewIT I really love kew, this is an amazing piece of software, thanks for it, and keep up the great work!

@0XCAFEBABE thank you for this amazing software!

@Goun No MIT? No javascript? Is this a dream? I’ll save this to check it out tomorrow, but great job already!

@Ifihadanameofme The update is great! It was already very nice with cargo but now it is available as a PKG and works great with chroma! These projects add so much to the daily experiences! Thank you to the author of the project as well as amazing Robert!

@tinmicto I absolutely love Kew my dear OP. Thank you to you and to all the fellow contributors. It’s amazing that Kew finally made it to the pkg manager.

@gavuwhitet Colours can be beautiful if done right Kew music player’s library is very pleasing to look at with auto colour selection, such a beautiful interface It’s just everything else doesn’t know what to do with colours

Ernesto @Balkamer I also used musicbee, i am now having a much better experience on kew music player.

@bipedalsheep Yeah! Love kew! It is my go-to player for my local library.

@tangonov It took me a minute to figure out how to get the music to play. Once I did, I was beyond impressed. Auto theming. Fully graphical album art in my terminal. It honestly shocked me in a good way!

@emptyhead41 I love this player. I tried quite a few before I found this and they were either too bulky (non-terminal ones), or required too much setup just to get audio working (some terminal ones I can’t remember). This was the only one that worked out of the box and had features that I didn’t even know i wanted (eg. ascii-art covers).

Anyway, keep it up man. You’re doing a fantastic job, not just making this thing, but managing all the contributions.

@kkw211 Kew is my favorite and cmus is pretty good, too.

@Available-Score-9007 I am really enjoying Kew thank you so much for it!

@tezoatlipoca hey. Im loving kew. best mp3 player. Just. Works. well done.

@njrk@im-in.space I’ve just discovered kew and I already love it, exactly what I was trying to do, albeit clumsily, with homemade scripts. Thanks for this great software!

@Sunsfever83 I love kew

@YTriom1 My beloved