kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux
Hi HN, I created kew, a music player for the Linux terminal. This started when I asked myself: what if I could just type something like "play nirvana" in the terminal and have the rest taken care of automatically? That got the ball rolling and I kept adding stuff: covers in ascii and then as sixel images, a playlist view, a visualizer, a library view and finally search. While kew can be used as a commandline tool, it has evolved into a TUI app. Here are some example commands: kew nirvana # Plays all of your Nirvana songs, shuffled kew nevermind # Plays the "Nevermind" album in order kew…
In plain words
Kew is a terminal-based music player for Linux that lets users play music by typing simple commands like "play nirvana" or "nevermind" to trigger artist, album, or track playback. Built as both a command-line tool and text user interface application, it includes features like ASCII and sixel image album covers, a playlist view, visualizer, library browser, and search functionality. Written in C and licensed under GPLv2, kew works best with music libraries organized by artist and album folders.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I created kew, a music player for the Linux terminal. This started when I asked myself: what if I could just type something like "play nirvana" in the terminal and have the rest taken care of automatically? That got the ball rolling and I kept adding stuff: covers in ascii and then as sixel images, a playlist view, a visualizer, a library view and finally search. While kew can be used as a commandline tool, it has evolved into a TUI app. Here are some example commands: kew nirvana # Plays all of your Nirvana songs, shuffled kew nevermind # Plays the "Nevermind" album in order kew spirit # Plays "Smells Like Teen Spirit" kew all # Plays all your music, shuffled kew albums # Plays one album after the other in random order It works best when your music library is organized like this: Artist/Album(s)/Track(s) kew is written in C and licensed under GPLv2. Source and screenshot: https://github.com/ravachol/kew
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