What is fetchit?

Fetchit is a command line tool for downloading videos from the terminal. You paste a link from YouTube, X, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, or any of about two thousand other sites supported through the yt-dlp project, and fetchit shows you the available formats before you download anything. The main interface is a full screen text based UI that takes over the terminal window. It centers itself, resizes as you resize the window, and restores your normal scrollback when you quit. You can pick a video quality with the arrow keys, the letter keys, number keys, or the mouse, and the picker shows an estimated file size for each option based on the real format data, so you know roughly how big a download will be before you confirm it. There is also a one click option to pull out just the audio as an mp3 at the best available quality. Beyond the interactive picker, fetchit has a scriptable mode. Running it with a flag like best or mp3 skips the picker entirely and downloads straight away, which is meant for use inside shell scripts, scheduled jobs, or automated pipelines. You can also grab just a chapter or a specific time range from a longer video, embed YouTube chapter markers into the saved file, and download playlists with several videos fetching at once instead of one at a time. For sites that require you to be logged in or that block automated requests, fetchit can reuse the cookies already stored in your web browser. It also keeps a short history of recently used links and remembers if your clipboard already has a link ready to paste. Installation does not require Python or any manual setup. A single install script downloads a ready to run binary for your operating system, or you can install it through npm if you already use Node.js. The underlying yt-dlp tool and ffmpeg are downloaded or found automatically the first time you run it. Fetchit is released under the MIT license and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.