trix-player 0.1.0

A beautiful, keyboard-driven terminal music player for Linux.
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Trix Player (Rust TUI)

A fast, keyboard-driven terminal music player for Linux terminals (kitty, alacritty, foot, wezterm, etc.).

This project is built for people who hate GUIs and want a clean, responsive, “nvim-like” music experience:

  • Rust + ratatui TUI (snappy redraws)
  • rodio audio playback with Symphonia decoding
  • Vim-ish, single-key controls + arrow-key seeking
  • Track name + time/progress display

Status

Early but usable: it can scan a folder of audio files, play them, switch tracks, seek, and adjust volume.

Requirements (Linux)

  • Rust toolchain (cargo)
  • A working audio setup (ALSA / PipeWire / PulseAudio)
  • System ALSA development headers (needed by cpal/alsa-sys):
    • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libasound2-dev
    • Fedora: sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel
    • Arch: sudo pacman -S alsa-lib

Build

cargo build --release

This produces a short executable named trix:

./target/release/trix --help

Run

If you run without a path, it will try your Music directory (XDG XDG_MUSIC_DIR if set, else ~/Music), falling back to the current directory.

Play a directory (recursively scans for audio files):

cargo run --release -- /path/to/music

Play a single file:

cargo run --release -- /path/to/song.mp3

Start at a specific track index:

cargo run --release -- --index 10 /path/to/music

Supported formats

File extensions currently detected:

  • mp3, flac, wav, ogg, m4a, aac, opus

(Actual decode support is provided by Symphonia; the list above is just the library scan filter.)

Keybindings

Playback:

  • q quit
  • Space pause/resume
  • P previous track
  • N next track
  • r restart current track (play from start)
  • l loop selected/current track
  • s toggle shuffle order

Seeking:

  • p seek -10s
  • n seek +10s
  • ← seek -5s
  • → seek +5s

Volume:

  • v toggle volume mode
  • While volume mode is ON: ↑ volume up, ↓ volume down (Esc exits)
    • Prefers controlling the ALSA system mixer when available; falls back to per-app gain.

Library:

  • ↑/↓ select track
  • Enter play selected
  • S search (type to select; Enter plays; Esc cancels)
  • D delete selected track (press twice to confirm)

Notes on seeking

Seeking is implemented by restarting decoding at the new offset (simple and reliable). It’s usually fast, but very large files or some formats may seek less smoothly.

Troubleshooting

  • No audio / ALSA error at startup: install the ALSA dev package for your distro (see Requirements) and ensure your system audio works outside this app.
  • Terminal looks weird after crash: run reset or restart the terminal.

Roadmap

Planned improvements:

  • Better library UX: search/filter, sort by name/mtime, shuffle/repeat
  • Metadata: show artist/album/title (tags)
  • Real mixer volume (system volume) instead of per-app gain (implemented via native backends; falls back to app gain)

Platform support

Linux only.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.