yoinks: download video from anywhere, right in your terminal

Fetching footage for remixes, offline archives or an editing pipeline means wading through popup ads, fake download buttons and sketchy redirects — plus Python dependency pain on the tools that actually work. yoinks compresses all of it into one terminal command: paste a link, pick a resolution, and the video lands in ~/Downloads. Under the hood is yt-dlp covering YouTube, X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok and 1,800+ other sites; designer Pablo Stanley wrapped it in a full-screen terminal UI that works with both keyboard and mouse. MIT-licensed, 3,690 stars as of October 3, 2026. The 视频号 account AI产品狙击手 covered it on October 3.

Core features

• One-command downloads: yoinks <url> goes straight to the format picker; a bare yoinks prompts for input. Pick quality with ↑/↓ (or j/k, or number keys), hit enter, and the file path prints when done.
• Resolutions and audio: the format list shows estimated file sizes, with audio-only MP3 extraction; high-res streams get merged via ffmpeg automatically.
• Zero-dependency setup: the first run downloads a standalone yt-dlp binary into ~/.yoinks/bin — no Python involved. If yt-dlp is already installed it uses yours; ffmpeg comes from PATH with an ffmpeg-static fallback.
• Small touches: the full-screen TUI restores your scrollback on exit; the auto theme follows your terminal’s light/dark palette with ^t to cycle; UI elements are clickable and the logo takes you home.
• Try before installing: npx yoinks runs it with nothing installed, on Node 18+.

Typical use cases

• Feeding editing pipelines like JianYing: copy the link from a page, two terminal commands, footage on disk.
• Offline archives: lectures, livestream replays and tutorials pulled back to local storage.
• Audio-only workflows: keep just the soundtrack of a podcast or video as MP3.

Quick start

npm install -g yoinks
yoinks

Or skip the install with npx yoinks. First run: take the one video you most want to keep — pick a resolution, enter, check ~/Downloads.

Summary

This fits people who regularly pull from video sites and don’t want a Python environment in the loop; anyone hoping to script batch queues will find it too manual — it’s an interactive TUI, not a scripting tool, and for bulk jobs you want upstream yt-dlp directly. Two pieces of background: the author is a designer (the Open Peeps creator), the repo was created July 16, 2026 and has not been pushed since July 17, with npm sitting at 0.3.1 — a “finished and parked” shape, where site-parsing breakage depends on the auto-updated yt-dlp binary to keep working. And downloads remain subject to each site’s terms of service: personal sourcing is one thing, redistributing what you download is another. Once you have the footage, see jianying-headless, published here the same day — it turns an editing plan into an editable JianYing draft.