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cmus

cmus
Original author(s)Timo Hirvonen
Initial releaseJune 5, 2005; 19 years ago (2005-06-05)[1]
Stable release2.11.0 (May 11, 2024; 4 months ago (2024-05-11)) [±]
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemUnix-like
Available inEnglish
TypeAudio player
LicenseGPL-2.0-or-later
Websitecmus.github.io

cmus (C Music Player) is a console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later and is operated exclusively through a text-based user interface, built with ncurses.

Employing a text-only design significantly reduces the resource demands for the program's operation, making it an optimal selection for underpowered computer systems. Moreover, it is advantageous for systems that do not possess a GUI, such as the X Window System. In some cases, using a terminal application can significantly accelerate navigating through the program.

History

cmus was originally written by Timo Hirvonen. At around June 2008, he discontinued development of cmus, which resulted in a fork named "cmus-unofficial" in November 2008. After a year of development, a takeover request was sent to SourceForge, which was granted after a 90-day period without response from the original author.[2] This resulted in a merge of the fork back into the official project in February 2010.[3]

User interface

The interface of cmus is centered on views. There are two views on the music library (an artist/album tree and a flat sortable list) and views on playlists, the current play queue, the file system and for filters/settings. There is always only one view visible at any time.

Owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard. Commands are loosely modeled after those of the text editor. General operation mimics being in command-mode of vi, where complex commands are issued by prepending them with a colon, (e.g. ":add /home/user/music-dir"), simpler, more common commands are bound to individual keys, such as "j/k" moving down/up, or "x" starting playback, and searches beginning with "/" as in "/the beatles".

Core features

cmus in the List view
cmus in the File Browser view
cmus in the Filter view

Keybindings

Here is a list of some common keybindings to interact with cmus while in the terminal, taken from the official manpage on a Linux distribution:

Command cmus name Action triggered
b player-next play next track
c player-pause pause current track
x player-play play current track (after being paused)
z player-prev play previous track
v player-stop stops current track and sets timestamp to 00:00
B play-next-album play next album (if available in current directory)
Z player-prev-album play previous album (if available in current directory)
left (left arrow key) seek -5 goes back 5 seconds in current track
right (right arrow key) seek +5 goes forward 5 seconds in current track

See also

References

  1. ^ Initial release tag
  2. ^ "SourceForge Ticket #6365". Archived from the original on 12 November 2012. Retrieved 27 June 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. ^ "Freshmeat announcement: cmus is alive". Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 24 April 2014.
  4. ^ https://dev.openwrt.org/changeset/26784 cmus added to OpenWrt
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