ncsb - An ncurses Squeezebox controller for Logitech Media Server (LMS)
Features
- slick curses TUI to control your squeezeboxes / squeezelite
- free-text and contextual search
- current playlist management
- player control
- album art in sixel-compliant terminals (experimental, off by default)
Screenshot / screencast
Usage
with dependencies available to your environment,
$ ncsb lms-server
where lms-server is the hostname or IP address of your LMS server.
To use a port other than the default 9000, use the --port or -p optional argument,
$ ncsb -p 9090 lms-server
In any screen, press ? for available commands.
Installation
Requires python 3 (tested on 3.9), with python packages requests, hy (0.20.0) and (for optional coverart) libsixel-python.
To install these with pip into your current environment (venv etc...),
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Incomplete list of sixel-supporting terminals here
See also foot,
patched gnome-terminal?,
xterm launced with xterm -ti vt340
or with xterm*decTerminalID : vt340 in .Xresources.
If you are seeing boxes or junk instead of nice unicode symbols for play/pause etc, you need to use a font with more complete unicode support. Hack works well.
In-terminal coverart requires libsixel to be installed on your system (presumably via your package manager) and a sixel-supporting terminal. Cover art notifications require libnotify to be installed.
Bugs
- flashing when loading album art, due to working around the nasty interactions between curses and sixel
- unable to write to top left of screen with curses when sixel image is displayed
- album title text update can partially overwrite the cover art sixel image
- because the font size and resolution is not known to curses, the album art size cannot be scaled to a terminal-appropriate size
Todo
- play general URL (pasted in)
- apps / podcast / menu
- detailed track info
- vim-style commands?
- colour themes
- use events instead of polling
- fix screencast
- scrolling when text is too wide for terminal
Credits
Copyright A S Sharma (2021), released under the GPL v3.0 (see LICENSE and AUTHORS). Thanks also to elParaguayo (LMSTools), Ralph Irving (squeezelite) and the Slimerver / Logitech Media Server authors for inspiration.