Cmus
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| CMus | |
 |
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| Maintainer: | Timo Hirvonen |
| Stable release: | 2.1.0 (December 21, 2006) [+/-] |
| Preview release: | none (none) [+/-] |
| OS: | Linux, BSD |
| Use: | Audio player |
| License: | GNU General Public License |
| Website: | onion.dynserv.net/~timo/cmus.html |
Cmus (C* Music Player) is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. Cmus is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and operates exclusively through a text-only interface, built with ncurses.
The text-only design vastly reduces the resources needed to run the program, making it a strong choice for very light computers as well as systems where a graphical environment (such as the X Window System) is not available. By eliminating the use of mouse, the program performs a wide array of tasks faster than its mouse-driven counterparts, albeit after some practice with the non-mouse paradigm.
[edit] Basic Use
Owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, Cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard (excepting the operation through cmus-remote). Commands are loosely modeled after those of the vi 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" searching (case insensitive) for any tracks containing both "the" and "beatles," order irrelevant. Note that default case insensitivity and searching for each of the space-separated terms is a deviation from the Regular Expressions engine that vi uses.
Any command may be bound to a single key, expediting complex commands' repeated use. The default configuration is fully customizable, which is a boon to non-English keyboard layouts.
A small tool called 'cmus-remote' allows manipulation of any aspect of Cmus available in the interactive program from externally.
[edit] Features
- Input Plugins
- Output Plugins
- Playing
- Interface
- Simple directory browser
- Fully customizable colors
- Tab-completion on commands
- Misc
- UTF-8 support
- Execute external commands for marked files
- Tested on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD
