Cws

CLI web search is a CLI search tool that shows the first N results from select search engines.

This started out because I wanted a way to play youtube video's in mpv without needing to open a browser first, because then why not watch it in my browser in the first place. I did find some similar projects but they just opened the results in my browser instead which was once again defeating the point.

The main use-cases are:

• Searching and fetching youtube/google/'whatever gets implemented' search results from the command line
• Executing default actions per search provider with the -x flag (see configuration), like opening youtube results in mpv
• Piping results to external commands to open/play results like your web browser or mpv for youtube

it heavily relies on rapidapi endpoints for now. Which means you need to register and configure personal API tokens for this to work. See the configuration section below for more info.

Development is done on irregular intervals, while heavily distracted so expect nothing. This is currently a first usable version, that will probably change a lot. Core functionality should stay about the same though.

Todo (for now):

• -c flag that shows only 1 result and copies that
• Interactive mode that allows selection of result and applying an action like copy or open
• Add more search providers
• Possibly add some webscraping fallback for when no api's are configured or free limits are reached

Installation

$ pip install cws_clisearch

Configuration

Configuration is done through .yml files either in $HOME or $XDG_HOME/cws/. There's 2 different config files, one mandatory and one optional:

• .cws_tokens.yml (mandatory)
• .cws_config.yml (optional)

.cws_tokens.yml

This is where your rapidapi tokens are loaded from.

Example:

google: "$token" # Get it from https://rapidapi.com/apigeek/api/google-search3/
youtube: "$token" # Get it from https://rapidapi.com/marindelija/api/youtube-search-results/

Use the --list-providers option to list all posibilities.

.cws_config.yml

This is where you override default settings of cws.

Example with defaults shown:

default_provider: 'google'
provider:
  youtube:
    default_action: 'mpv'
  google:
    default_action: 'firefox'

Usage

See cws -h for general usage information.

For now Google is the default search provider. The -x option implies -u and -n1, then pipes that output to whatever you want. It's also safe to manually use the -u and -n1 options to pipe results. This does not work with mpv, just like echo '$youtube_url' | mpv wouldn't. Use -x as a work-around.