Ani-CLI: Stream Anime Straight from Your Terminal

Let's be honest, sometimes you just want to watch an episode without five different pop-ups, autoplaying trailers, or a labyrinthine website interface. For developers and terminal enthusiasts, there's a certain elegance to keeping workflows contained in one place. That's where ani-cli comes in—a clever open-source tool that brings anime browsing and streaming directly to your command line.

It's a perfect example of a focused, single-purpose tool that does one thing exceptionally well. If you live in your terminal for work, why leave it for entertainment?

What It Does

ani-cli is a lightweight, bash-based command-line interface for finding, streaming, and downloading anime. You search for a title, select an episode, and it plays right there in your terminal's video player (or an external one). It scrapes its data from various anime indexing sites, providing a surprisingly smooth and ad-free experience compared to typical streaming websites.

Why It's Cool

The beauty of ani-cli is in its simplicity and efficiency. It's not a bloated application; it's a script that leverages existing, powerful tools like mpv or vlc for playback and fzf for fuzzy-finding through titles and episodes. This makes it incredibly fast and resource-light.

For developers, the workflow is seamless. You can be in the middle of a coding session, quickly pull up a terminal pane, type ani-cli "Spy x Family", and have an episode playing in minutes without ever touching a browser. It also respects the Unix philosophy—it's a tool that does its job and plays nicely with others. You can easily pipe its output or integrate it into other scripts if you wanted to get creative.

How to Try It

Getting started is straightforward. You'll need mpv (recommended), vlc, or another media player installed, along with fzf for the search interface.

Clone the repository and run the script:

git clone https://github.com/pystardust/ani-cli.git
cd ani-cli
sudo cp ani-cli /usr/local/bin/  # Or another directory in your $PATH

Then, just run it from anywhere:

ani-cli

Follow the prompts to search. To play a specific show immediately, you can provide the search query directly:

ani-cli "Attack on Titan"

Check out the GitHub repository for more detailed installation notes, dependencies, and configuration options (like setting a default video player or quality).

Final Thoughts

ani-cli is one of those tools that feels almost unnecessarily cool, but you quickly appreciate its practicality. It removes friction and distraction, which is something any developer can get behind. It's a testament to how the command line can be a powerful interface for almost anything, even leisure. If you're looking for a minimalist way to watch anime or just want to see a neat example of a well-built CLI tool, give this project a look. You might just find your new favorite way to unwind between coding sessions.

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