Snoop: a nickname searcher shipped as binaries, with an emoji font step in the install

Two install routes with different requirements

The project ships as ready-made assemblies and states that they need no dependencies and no Python installation, running on a clean machine with Windows or GNU/Linux. That is the route the release link points at. The alternative is building from source, and it is where the friction lives. The instructions begin with a clone, an apt-get update with python3 and python3-pip installed, an upgraded pip, and then the requirements file:

# Клонировать репозиторий
$ git clone https://github.com/snooppr/snoop

# Войти в рабочий каталог
$ cd ~/snoop

# Установить python3 и python3-pip, если они не установлены
$ apt-get update && apt-get install python3 python3-pip

# Установить зависимости 'requirements'
$ pip install --upgrade pip
$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

The stated requirement is Python 3.7 or newer, and there is a note that this route should not be used for Android or Termux, because that installation differs and has its own manual.

Country flags need an emoji font package installed first

One line of the source install is about typography rather than Python, and it is easy to skim past:

$ apt-get install fonts-noto-color-emoji #или $ apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts (монохромный)

The comment on that line says that if letter codes appear instead of flags, install a font package, for example the colour one or a monochrome alternative. So the tool renders country flags as emoji, and on a machine without an emoji font the flags degrade into two-letter codes in the output. That is a rendering issue rather than a data issue, but in a tool whose output is a table of sites and countries it makes the difference between a report you can read at a glance and one you have to decode. Two more constraints sit next to it. On Windows the instruction is to use cmd and explicitly not WSL, and the line that would follow the font note is commented out with a bare Добавлена, meaning added, with nothing after it. A Windows source build is therefore less specified than the Linux one, which is consistent with the released binaries being the primary route there.

The CLI is one nickname plus five service flags

The usage block is compact enough to take in as a whole. The binary form takes search arguments followed by a nickname, or service arguments, and the service set is five flags. --version and -V print the version and licence information. --list-all and -l print detailed information about the Snoop database. --donate and -d are for contributing to the project and for obtaining or purchasing the full version. --autoclean and -a delete all reports and clear the cache. --update and -U update Snoop. Search invocations differ by origin rather than by argument: running from source is python3 snoop.py nickname1, while the released Linux build is snoop_cli.bin nickname1, and the Windows equivalents are python snoop.py and snoop_cli.exe. A trailing note in the source install says that updating from source requires Git, which is the same dependency the clone step assumed.

Quoted names and Cyrillic both work, and results land in one directory

The examples cover the input cases that usually break a search tool. A nickname containing a space is passed as a quoted argument, and the underscore and hyphen forms of the same name are shown as separate examples, so the tool is not normalising those two separators for you. Cyrillic is demonstrated with a Russian given name as the argument. Control is interruptible, with ctrl + c ending the search, which matters for a tool that queries thousands of sites. Output has one destination regardless of input:

~/snoop/results/nicknames/*{txt|csv|html}

So three formats land under one directory keyed by nicknames, and the csv note tells you to open those in an office application with the field separator set to a comma. Deleting everything is described as removing the results directory, or equivalently using the autoclean flag. Two facts about that arrangement are worth stating plainly for research use: nothing prompts before writing, and everything accumulates in a plain directory in your home folder with no encryption and no per run separation beyond the nickname.

The platform table excludes macOS, iOS, and WSL

The support table is six rows with three different markers rather than two. GNU and Linux, Windows 7 and 11, and Android through Termux all carry a check. macOS carries an exclamation mark rather than a check, iOS and WSL carry a prohibition sign. Since the page does not define what the middle marker means, the honest reading is that macOS is partially supported and the other two are not supported, and a user on any of the three should establish which before planning around the tool. The platform line underneath states the deliverable plainly: Snoop for Windows and GNU/Linux. Two features in the tree also imply an Android story is supported rather than merely hoped for, since there is a separate Android manual and a separate English version of it, and the source install explicitly excludes the Android case because it differs.

Requirements mix hard pins with floors, including one very old pin

The requirements file is ten lines and the mixture of operators is the notable part. Three entries are exact pins: charset-normalizer at 3.4.0, colorama at 0.4.6, and idna at 3.10. Three more are exact pins with a ceiling on age rather than a floor: certifi at 2025.10.5 or newer, psutil at 5.9.6 or newer, and requests at 2.28.0 or newer. rich requires 13.0.1 or newer, urllib3 requires 1.26.16 or newer, and speedtest-cli is pinned to exactly 2.1.3. That last one is the line to notice: an exact pin on a networking utility that is several releases behind, while everything around it tracks upward. Since the release binaries bundle their own copies, this file only governs the source route, so a source install and a released binary can be running different versions of the same dependency. The presence of speedtest-cli and of a separate network test script in the tree explains that entry: the tool checks bandwidth as part of deciding how many sites it can query.

Six README translations, a licence gap, and one release tag

The documentation is multilingual in a way that is easy to miss from the repository listing alone: there are readme files for English, Spanish, German, Chinese and French alongside the Russian original, plus two Android manuals in Russian and English, and each language link asks readers to improve the translation. The project describes itself as created on February 14, 2020, and says it was developed without taking into account the opinions of the NSA and their friends, which is a statement of intent rather than a technical claim. The full version is described as carrying a database of more than 5400 websites, with a separate file in the tree comparing the site indexation of similar tools, and reports are available in csv, txt, CLI and map form, with an HTML report placing geocoded results on an OpenStreetMap base. The licence field records nothing usable while the tree holds both a COPYRIGHT file and a PublicKey.asc, so the grant is not determinable from what is visible. Release history is a single tag, v1.4.3 dated 2026-01-01, against a most recent commit of 2026-10-01.

Editorial conclusion

Snoop fits someone doing open source research on a username across many public services, who wants a tool that needs neither an account nor technical skill and works from a binary. It does not fit macOS, iOS, or WSL, all of which the project's own platform table marks as unsupported or partial. Before installing from source, expect to install a colour emoji font package so country flags render instead of letter codes, and note that the results directory is plain txt, csv, and html under your home directory, which is where any personal data you collect will live. The licence field records nothing while the tree carries a COPYRIGHT file, so ask before redistributing.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. snooppr/snoop on GitHub