ncspot

ncurses Spotify client written in Rust using librespot. It is heavily inspired by ncurses MPD clients, such as ncmpc. My motivation was to provide a simple and resource friendly alternative to the official client as well as to support platforms that currently don't have a Spotify client, such as the *BSDs.

Resource footprint comparison

Measured using ps_mem on Linux during playback:

Client	Private Memory	Shared Memory	Total
ncspot	22.1 MiB	24.1 MiB	46.2 MiB
Spotify	407.3 MiB	592.7 MiB	1000.0 MiB

Requirements

• Rust
• Python 3 (needed for building rust-xcb dependency)
• libpulse-dev (or portaudio-dev, if you want to use the PortAudio backend)
• libncurses-dev and libssl-dev
• libdbus-1-dev
• libxcb + development headers (for clipboard access)
• A Spotify premium account
• pkg-config

On Debian based systems you need following packages for libxcb developement headers:

sudo apt install libpulse-dev libssl-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev

Usage

• Install the latest ncspot release using cargo install ncspot
  • or build it yourself using cargo build --release
  • both approaches require a working Rust installation
• For debugging, pass a debug log filename, e.g. ncspot -d debug.log

Audio backends

By default ncspot is built using the Rodio backend. To make it use the PortAudio backend (e.g. for *BSD or macOS), you need to recompile ncspot with the portaudio_backend feature:

• cargo run --no-default-features --features portaudio_backend,cursive/pancurses-backend

Key Bindings

These keybindings are hardcoded for now. In the future it may be desirable to have them configurable.

• Navigate through the screens using the F-keys:
  • F1: Queue
    • c clears the entire queue
    • d deletes the currently selected track
    • Ctrl-s opens a dialog to save the queue to a playlist
  • F2: Search
  • F3: Library
    • d deletes the currently selected playlist
• Tracks and playlists can be played using Return and queued using Space
• s will save, d will remove the currently selected track to/from your library
• o will open a detail view or context menu for the selected item
• Shift-o will open a context menu for the currently playing track
• a will open the album view for the selected item
• A will open the artist view for the selected item
• Backspace closes the current view
• Shift-p toggles playback of a track
• Shift-s stops a track
• Shift-u updates the library cache (tracks, artists, albums, playlists)
• < and > play the previous or next track
• f and b to seek forward or backward
• Shift-f and Shift-b to seek forward or backward in steps of 10s
• - and + decrease or increase the volume
• r to toggle repeat mode
• z to toggle shuffle playback
• q quits ncspot
• x copies a sharable URL of the song to the system clipboard
• Shift-x copies a sharable URL of the currently selected item to the system clipboard

You can also open a Vim style commandprompt using :, the following commands are supported:

• quit: Quit ncspot
• toggle: Toggle playback
• stop: Stop playback
• previous/next: Play previous/next track
• clear: Clear playlist
• share [current | selected]: Copies a sharable URL of either the selected item or the currernt song to the system clipboard

The screens can be opened with queue, search, playlists and log, whereas search can be supplied with a search term that will be entered after opening the search view.

Configuration

Configuration is saved to ~/.config/ncspot/config.toml. Possible configuration values are:

• proxy: Set an HTTP proxy
• use_nerdfont: Turn nerdfont glyphs on/off <true/false>
• theme: Set a custom color palette (see below)

Theming

The color palette can be modified in the configuration. For instance, to have ncspot match Spotify's official client, you can add the following entries to the configuration file:

[theme]
background = "black"
primary = "light white"
secondary = "light black"
title = "green"
playing = "green"
playing_bg = "black"
highlight = "light white"
highlight_bg = "#484848"
error = "light white"
error_bg = "red"
statusbar = "black"
statusbar_progress = "green"
statusbar_bg = "green"
cmdline = "light white"
cmdline_bg = "black"

More examples can be found in pull request hrkfdn#40.