What is yoinks?

yoinks is a terminal tool for downloading videos from YouTube, X, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and thousands of other sites by just pasting a link. A user pastes a url, picks a resolution or an audio only mp3 option from a list, and the file downloads straight to their Downloads folder, with no popup ads, fake buttons, or redirect pages of the kind common on many video downloading websites. It installs globally with npm, or can be tried immediately with npx without installing anything permanently, and only requires Node 18 or newer since the other pieces it depends on are fetched or bundled automatically. Once running, it takes over the full terminal window with a centered interface, lets the user move through format choices with arrow keys, vim style keys, or number keys, and restores the normal terminal scrollback when it exits. The mouse also works for clicking the yoink button, the format list, and footer controls. The color theme can follow the terminal's own light or dark colors automatically, or be forced to a specific light or dark palette from the command line or by pressing a key during use. Under the hood, yoinks relies on the existing yt-dlp project to do the actual downloading, fetching a standalone copy of it on first run so no separate Python installation is required, or using an existing yt-dlp installation if one is already present. ffmpeg handles merging high resolution video streams and extracting mp3 audio, using a bundled fallback if it is not already available on the system. The terminal interface itself is built with Ink, which lets React style components render inside a terminal. The project describes itself as a personal archiving tool and notes that downloading content from these platforms may violate their terms of service, so it asks users to only download what they actually have the right to keep. Planned future additions include flags to skip the format picker entirely, a custom output folder option, playlist support, and clipboard based url detection. It is released under the MIT license.