Hacker News: ravachol

Show HN: Kew, A distraction-free terminal music player, now on Windows

ravachol — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:26:11 +0000

Hi HN,

I have finally ported kew, a music player for the terminal, to Windows. We are everywhere now, watch out!

Some of kew's features:

- Play auto-generated playlists based on words from the artist, album or song name: 'kew nirvana'. - Private and offline* (*discord gets notified but this can be turned off). - Music without distractions or algorithmic manipulation. - Gapless playback. - Music library explorer. - Search - Full color covers in sixel-capable terminals.

kew 4.1 adds cross-fade (both on-demand and always on), auto-resume, more colorful spectrum visualizer modes and custom layouts.

More info here: https://github.com/ravachol/kew

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41740915

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725477

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ravachol in "New kew v4.0 "Love is gonna save us edition" [video]"

ravachol — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:17:48 +0000

New in this version:

New playback pipeline with improved performance and latency (built on miniaudio)

Real-time ASCII visualizations (via Chroma)

Free, open source, no tracking, no ads, completely offline.

More info: https://codeberg.org/ravachol/kew Or: https://github.com/ravachol/kew

New kew v4.0 "Love is gonna save us edition" [video]

ravachol — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:17:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql5ZKeaX2MQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015128

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ravachol in "Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s?"

ravachol — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 13:07:12 +0000

Hi, I'm the developer of kew which works for linux, macOS, Android and FreeBSD.

The two best places to buy music in my opinion are qobuz and bandcamp.

https://github.com/ravachol/kew

I encourage you to go check out my app.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 15:41:44 +0000

That's great! Get involved if you want and suggest features for instance.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 02:47:18 +0000

That's already mostly in. From the readme:

kew dir (sometimes it's necessary to specify it's a directory you want)

kew song (or a song)

kew list (or a playlist)

The directory can be an artist or an album, so there's still ambiguity there. But kew cannot differentiate between the two. It matches against files or against directories.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 01:39:52 +0000

Like you said, it just takes the first result it finds. There is -e for exact search, which solves some problems, but it's not a full blown solution.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:35:19 +0000

Because I'm just one guy with a few people helping me a little bit. I needed a limited scope. But I'm actually thinking of porting it to Mac now.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 23:23:56 +0000

done.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 22:59:46 +0000

He's right actually the quick-install script is pretty barbaric.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 22:29:49 +0000

Good point. Might be better to just have the commands installing the requirements for the different distros, in the readme.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:45:25 +0000

"Buffer Overflow vulnerability in Freeimage v3.18.0 allows attacker to cause a denial of service via a crafted JXR file."

I don't know how relevant these vulnerabilities are to kew, which isn't run across the network in any way, it just reads your local files.

Thank you for bringing this to light. I don't know how feasible it is to use something other than freeimage though, gonna have to investigate.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:26:12 +0000

kew does not scrobble. It does not track any of your listening habits or anything else for that matter.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:24:27 +0000

FreeImage is used by Chafa to display the covers in the terminal.

The version of kew packaged for Nix is very old: v1.5.2. We're at version 2.8.2. So it's more than a year old, from very early on in the project.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:57:05 +0000

That's an easter egg! Gj! You're the first that has mentioned it.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:12:49 +0000

Oh ok, my bad! And GOOD.

I agree it's important. kew is so small it was pretty trivial to do.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 16:27:37 +0000

You uninstalled it. :(

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 14:58:09 +0000

Yes, while a comically large music library is supported in principle (kew offers to cache your library if it takes a long time to search through), it might not be entirely suited for it.

As for your other two suggestions those fall outside the scope of kew. kew is supposed to be simple with minimal bloat.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 14:31:55 +0000

Yes, unfortunately it only works on Linux and FreeBSD. I should add that to the readme.

EDIT: Added.

New comment by ravachol in "Show HN: kew – A Terminal Music Player for Linux"

ravachol — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 14:15:07 +0000

Thank you. To answer your first question, ambiguity isn't resolved unfortunately. When the album has the same name as the artist for instance, I have sometimes resorted to renaming the album name by adding "album" to it. You can however get an exact search by adding -e so that resolves some problems.

Yes, MPRIS is supported.