Anonymous Twitch TUI for browsing and watching live streams.

No Twitch account, no OAuth, no tracking. Plays through Twitch ad breaks with live HLS-session bypass — the player never stalls on a midroll. Runs mpv or vlc under the hood.

Features

• Browse live streams by category or search channels by name
• Favorites (WatchList tab) with live status, viewer count, uptime
• Ignore list — hide channels everywhere with x
• Ad-break bypass — segment-level ad filtering plus a live HLS-session swap under the running player, so midrolls turn into a short glitch instead of a silent pause. MPEG-TS PCR/PTS/DTS and continuity counters are rewritten at the swap boundary to keep the player's demuxer happy.
• Quality picker (i) or auto-best
• Theme picker (t) with 11 presets; honors NO_COLOR
• Auto-refresh at a configurable interval
• ASCII fallback for terminals without Unicode (--ascii, TERM=linux)
• Live chat pane per playing stream (anonymous, read-only); opens on demand with C or automatically via [chat] auto-open. Pause on scroll-back, cycle with c, hide with C

Install

Binary release (recommended): download the archive for your platform from Releases, extract, move twui to somewhere on your $PATH.

# example for linux/amd64
curl -LO https://github.com/Stoica-Mihai/twui/releases/latest/download/twui_<version>_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf twui_<version>_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo mv twui /usr/local/bin/

From source:

git clone https://github.com/Stoica-Mihai/twui
cd twui
make build
./twui

Requires Go 1.25+ and one of mpv (default) or vlc on your $PATH.

Usage

twui                 # launch the TUI
twui 1080p60         # launch with a default quality hint
twui --ascii         # 7-bit safe glyphs
twui --refresh 1m    # auto-refresh the current view every 60s

Keys (see ? in the TUI for the full list):

Key	Action
j / k	Navigate
Tab / Shift+Tab	Switch view
Enter	Launch stream / open category
/	Search
f	Toggle favorite
x	Toggle ignore
i	Quality picker
t	Theme picker
r	Related / host channels
?	Help overlay
q / Ctrl+C	Quit

Related overlay (opened with r):

Key	Action
j / k	Navigate
Enter	Launch the selected stream
f	Toggle favorite on the selected channel
x	Ignore the selected channel (drops from the overlay)
Esc / r	Close

Chat pane (appears when a stream is playing):

Key	Action
c	Cycle focus between live sessions
C	Toggle chat pane visibility
[ / ]	Scroll chat back / forward one line (back auto-pauses)
{ / }	Scroll chat back / forward one page
Mouse wheel over pane	Scroll (auto-pauses)
Space	Resume autoscroll, jump to newest
Esc	Hide pane

Config

Lives at ~/.config/twui/config.toml and is written in place on favorite / ignore / theme changes.

[twitch]
channels    = ["streamer1", "streamer2"]   # favorites
ignored     = ["channelX"]
low-latency = false

[general]
player      = "mpv"          # or "vlc"
player-args = []             # extra player args
refresh     = "30s"          # auto-refresh interval; 0 or empty = disabled

[theming]
theme = "catppuccin"         # or: default, dracula, nord, solarized-dark,
                             # gruvbox, tokyo-night, rose-pine, kanagawa,
                             # everforest, one-dark
# Optional per-field hex overrides:
# border = "#..."
# text   = "#..."
# live   = "#..."

[chat]
enabled     = true           # set false to never open IRC connections
max-backlog = 500            # per-session message cap
auto-open   = false          # true: connect + show pane on stream launch
                             # false (default): connect lazily when you press C

Environment variables:

Variable	Effect
NO_COLOR	Disable all ANSI color output
TWUI_ASCII	Force ASCII glyphs (same as --ascii)
TWUI_*	Override any config key (Viper convention)

Development

make test            # go test ./...
make test-race       # with -race
make test-live       # network required; Twitch API canary
make coverage        # coverage.out + summary
make lint            # requires golangci-lint installed
make fmt             # gofmt + goimports