yoinks: a thin yt-dlp wrapper, a hardcoded output folder, and a picker you cannot skip

The terms of service warning is three lines, and it sits after the roadmap

The legal position is stated plainly and briefly. yoinks is described as a personal-archiving tool, the documentation says downloading content may violate a platform's terms of service, and the instruction is to download only what you have the right to keep and to be excellent to creators. That is the entire statement. It appears after the feature list, the install instructions, the development section and the roadmap, which means the reader meets the pitch first. Nothing in the code is presented as a way around a restriction: the work is delegated to a general purpose downloader, the interface only chooses a format, and the disclaimer frames the whole tool as an archiving aid rather than a distribution channel.

The interface takes the terminal over and gives the scrollback back

Running the tool with a url goes straight to the format picker, and running it with no argument prompts for one. The picker is full-screen and centered, and the documentation makes a point of saying the scrollback is restored on exit, which is the difference between this and a program that leaves your shell history scrolled away. Selection takes the arrow keys, or j and k, or number keys, with enter to confirm, escape to go back and control-c to quit. The mouse works too: the main button, the format list and the footer hints are all clickable, and clicking the logo returns to the home screen. Files land in ~/Downloads and the full path is printed to the terminal when the job finishes, which matters because the interface itself is gone by then.

The auto theme reads the terminal's own colours, and the override lasts one session

Three palettes ship: auto, light and dark. Auto is the default and works by using the terminal's own foreground and background rather than guessing, so it follows whatever theme the terminal is already set to. The other two are overrides. You can switch during a run with control-t or by clicking the theme control in the footer, and that choice applies to the current session, so the next launch comes back to auto. To set the starting palette for one launch instead, the flag is `--theme auto`, `--theme light` or `--theme dark`. The split between the two mechanisms is the detail to remember: the flag decides where a session starts, the keypress decides where it goes, and neither writes a configuration file.

The yt-dlp binary is downloaded into your home directory and nothing updates it

Extraction is not implemented here. On first run the tool downloads the standalone yt-dlp binary into ~/.yoinks/bin, which is what lets it claim no Python is required, and if a yt-dlp is already installed it uses that one instead. So there are two backends in play and the choice is made silently at startup. The consequence shows up over time rather than on day one: self-update for the bundled binary, implemented as a call to yt-dlp -U, is an unchecked item on the roadmap. Nothing in the documentation describes a way to keep that binary current, so a user who never installed yt-dlp themselves is running a backend whose version the project does not track.

ffmpeg comes from your PATH, with a pinned static build behind it

Two jobs need an external encoder: merging separate high-resolution streams, and extracting audio as mp3. ffmpeg is looked up on the PATH first, and ffmpeg-static is the fallback that ships with the package, pinned in the dependency list at a 5.x range. That ordering is sensible, since a system ffmpeg is usually newer than a bundled one, and it means the tool works on a machine that has ffmpeg installed and still works on one that does not. The version difference is the part to keep in mind: the fallback is frozen at whatever the dependency range resolves to and is not managed by the application, so a machine without a system ffmpeg silently runs an older encoder than a machine with one, with no message saying so.

The 1,800 sites belong to the backend, and so does every fix that lands after release

The claim of 1,800 or more sites is a description of what yt-dlp supports, not a measurement of this package. The same is true of format coverage, of which resolutions appear in the picker, and of every site that stops working when a platform changes: the fix arrives upstream, gets folded into a new yt-dlp release, and reaches a yoinks user only if that binary is updated. What this package actually adds is a small amount of code and four runtime dependencies, the three Ink components for the picker and the spinner, React itself, and the ffmpeg fallback. Read that way, the tool is an interface decision rather than a capability claim, and its long-term behaviour is coupled to a project it does not release alongside.

Output is hardcoded to Downloads, and the picker cannot be skipped

The roadmap is the most informative part of the documentation, because the checked and unchecked boxes describe the current state exactly. One box is checked: publishing to npm. Everything else is open, including a --best flag and an --mp3 flag to skip the picker for scriptable use, an -o flag to choose the output folder, playlist and thread support, clipboard detection to auto-suggest a copied url, self-update for the bundled binary, and a curl piped installer. Two consequences follow today. There is no way to choose a destination directory, so files always land in ~/Downloads, and there is no non-interactive mode, so every invocation ends at a picker, which is what these three invocations show:

$ yoinks https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ    # straight to the format picker
$ yoinks                                 # prompts for a url
$ yoinks --theme light                   # force the light palette

For a person at a keyboard that is fine; for a script it is a wall.

Node 18 is the runtime floor while the type definitions target a much newer toolchain

The engines field and the documentation agree on the floor, requiring Node 18 or newer. The development dependencies do not stay in the same era: the type definitions for Node are on a 26.x line and the React types on a 19.x line, with TypeScript on a 7.x line, tsup in the 8.x range and tsx in the 4.x range. That gap is normal for a package supporting a wide runtime range while developing on a current one, but it means the type layer is not evidence about what runs on 18. Release discipline is the other thing worth noting: the version in the package file is 0.3.1 and the install paths are the npm package and npx, while the repository itself carries no release tags at all. Publishing runs tests, typecheck and build before anything goes out, and only the dist directory is published.

Editorial conclusion

Use yoinks if you want a keyboard-driven picker instead of a page full of fake download buttons, and only for material you have the right to keep, because the project's own note says downloading may violate a platform's terms of service and that warning sits near the bottom of its documentation rather than the top. Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it. It is not scriptable yet, since the flags that skip the picker and choose an output directory are both open roadmap items, and output is hardcoded to your Downloads folder. And the part that actually fetches video is a separate binary downloaded on first run into your home directory, with updating that binary also an open item, so the tool you depend on is maintained somewhere else. For a one-off personal archive it is a pleasant interface over a familiar backend; for anything automated, wait for the picker to become optional.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. pablostanley/yoinks on GitHub
4. README