Kew: Listening to Music in the Linux Terminal

F5 : Search view
You can see the album cover while you’re listening to it.It’s straightforward to install Kew because it’s available in the repositories of the common Linux Distributions like Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo., etc.F3 : Library view

Meet Kew

And that’s just one of the many unusual things you can do in the terminal.F4 : Track View

First things go first: Installation

F6 : HelpFor Debian and Ubuntu-based distros, use:If you decided to use Kew regularly, it would be much better to use and remember various keyboard shortcuts. You can surely configure your own.You can make a playlist based on the content of a directory (and the others inside it recursively). The playlist can be edited/modified inside Kew in the Playlist view. I came across Kew, a terminal music player fully written in C. It’s small (not more than 1 MiB), with a low memory profile. You can create and play your own playlists!There are different views for different functions that can be accessed via a function key.

If you give it a try, do share its experience in the comments.F2 : Current PlaylistYou can play the songs from the playlist using:sudo apt install kew

kew bruce

There are several terminal audio players like Cmus, MOC – Music on Console, Musikcube, etc. Kew can be placed in this list of terminal tools.

Yes, it could be funny, but it’s real, you could play music from your command-line.

sudo yay -S kew

Jose Antonio Tenés
A Communication engineer by education, and Linux user by passion. In my spare time, I play chess, do you dare?

Written in C, with a small memory blueprint, Kew is worth trying for a terminal dweller.

Key bindings

Press F6 and it will show the key bindings:When you use the terminal more often than the graphical tools, you would perhaps enjoy playing music from the terminal.

• + (or =), keys to adjust the volume.
• ←, → or h, l keys to switch tracks.
• space, p to toggle pause.
• F2 or Shift + z to show/hide the playlist.
• F3 or Shift + x to show/hide the library.
• F4 or Shift + c to show/hide the track view.
• F5 or Shift + v to search.
• F6 or Shift + b to show/hide key bindings.
• u to update the library.
• v to toggle the spectrum visualizer.
• i to switch between using your regular color scheme or colors derived from the track cover.
• b to toggle album covers drawn in ascii or as a normal image.
• r to repeat the current song.
• s to shuffle the playlist.
• a to seek back.
• d to seek forward.
• x to save the currently loaded playlist to a m3u file in your music folder.
• Tab to switch between views.
• gg go to first song.
• number + G, g or Enter, go to specific song number in the playlist.
• g go to last song.
• . to add current song to kew.m3u (run with “kew .”).
• Esc to quit.

Conclusion

sudo zypper install kew

Exploring music with Kew

I’ve seen things… seen things that you people wouldn’t believe… Linux developed by governments, Linux on mobiles, and terminal audio players. A new (or perhaps old) way of enjoying music for the command-line enthusiasts.

Author Info

kew kew.m3u

Direct Functions

Read moreVMware NSX 4 – vCenter Plugin

Kew provides some direct functions that you can type with kew: