kew 4.1 adds:
- Cross-fade (both on-demand and automatic).
- More cool visualizer modes (press v).
- Auto-resume.
- Custom layouts.
More info here:
Looks neat, but I don’t think that you can claim to be “Private and offline” when the default is to broadcast what you’re playing. That feature should be opt-in, not opt-out
Well, I don’t exactly do that, there’s an asterisk that explains the situation in one sentence.
kew itself does not have telemetry, it does not collect data, it does not access the internet. It passes now playing to discord if discord is running, and this can be turned off. Discord of course, uploads that information and broadcasts to others.
For someone who cares about privacy for real, not running discord is all they have to do.
But I hear what you are saying, and I had serious doubts about allowing this, and will consider it. The problem is most people want the now playing feature, and it also helps spread the word. I think only a tiny minority edits their settings at all. but I could be wrong.
I went ahead and changed it to opt-in and it’s now on main. I’m going to await what other people have to say, but likely this will be opt-in in the next release, which will be soon because there’s a problem with FreeBsd.
I’m also going to add a “How to make sure kew is private” section to the readme.
EDIT: Made the release, so from 4.1.3 onward discord is opt-in.
I’ve used kew for a bit now and while I haven’t gotten too deep into every feature, I’m really enjoying it. I just especially appreciate the visualizer, in a world where no one wants to give us visualizers anymore…
Keep up the great work!
Thank you! I’m getting the cold shoulder everywhere now because people think it’s AI slop.
On r/commandline it had 1.7k views and 1 upvote. And then it got down voted. Hah. These people are going to accidentally guillotine John Connor.
Neat, but I am curious what the purpose of this is. Did you do it just because you could, or is there some specific workflow that lends itself to listening to music through a CLI rather than a GUI?
I am also part of a movement back towards TUIs. Not everything needs to be Electron/an entire container.
I wanted to do a music player for Linux because I think streaming is bad for MUSIC, and the GUI options didn’t inspire me at all. The terminal is cool, it has been around for a very long time, and it works pretty much everywhere. It’s also nice for something minimalistic like kew. I wanted something that will immerse you in the music, and not having borders and scrollbars and stuff, helps. Especially when we are talking about the alternative being ugly those things.
There are also commands for kew. You can make kew generate playlist for you.
kew nirvana # plays all your nirvana music shuffled
kew nirv #same thing
kew neverm #plays nevermind album in order
kew song smells #force it to look for a song that contains the string smells
kew dir nevermind # force it to find the folder not a song
kew wu-tang:raekwon:ghost:meth # plays a bunch of wu-tang music, shuffled
kew all # shuffles and adds all your music to the playlist
kew albums # plays all albums on after the other, in random order
This was the first feature. Originally it was going to be called play. Play beatles. I just thought that was very cool. Then it became cue but that was taken too, so now it’s kew.
EDIT: There’s actually a script in the repo that is called play.sh that will create the play alias for kew.
This is fascinating, thank you for replying!
Thank you for making me aware of Jenova 7.
I’m listening to their whole back catalog now :D
Hey man, he’s a great musician and also a really nice guy. Also, i made that cover (I’m also an artist).
He’s a film scholar and watched hundreds of hours of old scifi movies to get the samples for the album.
Oh nice!
Love the art style!
Thanks. I post my drawings here: https://social.vivaldi.net/@ravachol
https://slopscan.ava.pet/repo/https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fravachol%2Fkew
But I think most of those positives from Claude were PRs from a contributor, FWIW.
I’ve never vibe coded. I think that’s the macoS media keys integration that someone generated.
why does it say claude…?
Just as it says in Sans post right above mine, because some PR’s other people authored apparently were made with Claude. I have never tried co-pilot or claude opus or codex or whatever. I have used AI tools, and asked a lot of questions, but very carefully, not vibe coded, and I don’t pay them money. I just checked all those 15 commits (out of thousands) and they are made by two people who aren’t me. You can check it yourself, git clone the repo, take the hash out of each of those commits, and write git log <hash>. Look at the author’s name at the very top commit that is displayed, it’s not me.
Besides, you guys should be going after the big corporations not small beginner indie devs which vibe coders usually are.
Also, I now know which feature was made with claude, and it’s really an awesome feature, it’s the visualizer changing color depending on how loud a certain frequency is. I’m not cutting it, I love that feature, it’s very beautiful. And I’ve talked to the guy, I’m sure he spent a lot of time getting that right.
I have programmed professionally since 1996.
thanks for clarifying bro
Np. Actually thank you, it’s nice to get that out of my chest too.
I get that!
idk if english is your first language so ill correct (with kindness) that the expression is off my chest.
So it’s not about facehuggers? j/k. It’s not my first language, I actually know the expression but I make little mistakes like this sometimes when I’m not focused.




