yoinks: pull video down from the terminal

TL;DR: yoinks is a small TypeScript CLI for pulling video files from the terminal, pitched directly against the download sites that wrap every video in ads. MIT licensed and 342 KB, but the last push was in July 2026, so treat it as dormant rather than maintained.

What it is

The description is two sentences with no padding: “yoink any video from your terminal. no shady ads.”

The positioning is the whole product. Downloading a video through a website means a page full of injected video players, interstitials, and download buttons that lead somewhere else. A CLI that takes a URL and writes a file removes that layer entirely, along with the tracking and the popups.

That is a narrow scope and a defensible one. There are established tools for command-line media retrieval, and a new entrant has to earn its place. The argument here is simplicity and a clean install, not capability.

Language is TypeScript and the whole repository is 342 KB. There is no bundled binary, no compile step, and no runtime weight to speak of.

The dormancy question

git clone https://github.com/pablostanley/yoinks

Field	Value
Stars	2,958
Forks	278
Language	TypeScript
License	MIT
Created	2026-07-16
Last push	2026-07-17
Size on disk	342 KB

The dates are the finding here. The repository was created on 16 July 2026 and last received a push the next day. That is under two weeks of activity, and roughly eleven weeks have passed since.

This is not a complaint. Plenty of useful tools are written once and left alone, and a small CLI that does one thing rarely needs a roadmap. But it does change how you should evaluate it:

• There is no release cadence to plan around
• Upstream will not fix a break when a host site changes
• The 2,958 stars reflect launch interest, not sustained usage, and stars accumulated in a launch spike carry less information than stars accumulated over years

The fork ratio of about eleven to one is unremarkable for a small utility and does not suggest heavy downstream dependence.

What you are actually depending on

Downloading video from a host means parsing whatever that host serves today. That parsing layer breaks regularly, and when it breaks nothing in your repository tells you why. You just get an empty file.

Practically, that means:

• Expect to fix or replace this when a host changes
• Check the age of the code before depending on it for anything unattended
• Keep the MIT license in mind, which makes forking an entirely reasonable response

If you need this in a script that runs on a schedule, fork it and own the maintenance, or pick a project with recent commits.

A note on what you download

The tool downloads whatever URL you give it. That makes the compliance question yours, not the tool’s. What you fetch and what you do with it depends on your source, your jurisdiction, and whether the content is licensed for your use.

When it fits

It fits if you want a one-command way to grab a file, dislike ad pages, and are willing to own the result if it stops working.

It does not fit if you need ongoing reliability, a maintained media backend, or anything that has to keep working without you watching it.

At 342 KB and MIT licensed, reading it takes five minutes. Worth doing before you install it.

Source and Accuracy Notes

• Project page: https://github.com/pablostanley/yoinks
• Source repository: pablostanley/yoinks (verified via GitHub API html_url)
• License: MIT (verified via GitHub API license.spdx_id)
• Stars at time of writing: 2,958
• Counts, language, license, and dates were read from the GitHub REST API. Supported hosts, command flags, and extraction behaviour were not independently verified against the README.