Tool Open source · MIT
yoinks is a terminal video-downloading CLI for YouTube, X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and other supported sites. It accepts a pasted URL, presents an interactive format picker for video resolutions or audio-only MP3 extraction, and saves files to ~/Downloads. The terminal interface is built with Ink, a React framework for terminals, and supports keyboard and mouse controls plus light, dark, and automatic themes.
The tool uses yt-dlp for downloading. On first run it fetches a standalone yt-dlp binary to ~/.yoinks/bin when a system installation is unavailable, while ffmpeg is used for high-resolution stream merging and MP3 extraction, with ffmpeg-static as a fallback. It requires Node 18 or later and is distributed under the MIT license.