aria2c · yt-dlp · wget, under one keyboard

A download manager that lives in your terminal¶

Paste a link. muxget picks the right engine, queues it, and shows you live progress. Files, torrents and magnets go to aria2c, videos and playlists to yt-dlp, whole websites to wget. One list, one set of keys, everything at once.

Install muxget Read the manual MIT licensed · Linux, macOS, Windows

muxget — 3 running, 2 queued

muxget downloading three files at once in a terminal, with a queue sidebar, progress bars and a throughput sparkline

$ muxget # empty, press `a` to add a url

$ muxget https://example.com/linux.iso # start with something queued

$ muxget -d ~/Downloads -j 5 <url>... # folder, and five at a time

$ muxget --theme nord # six built in, or write your own

$

What it does¶

Anything with a link¶

Direct files, FTP, .torrent files, magnet links, videos, playlists, whole channels, entire websites. The url decides the engine, or a rule of yours does.

Queues with their own slots¶

Each queue runs its own number of downloads at once, so a busy lane never blocks another one. Order is priority, and you can promote a row with one key.

It resumes¶

Close the app mid-download and the next launch picks up from the partial file. Paused rows come back paused, and retries already spent stay spent.

Schedules and quotas¶

Run a queue only between 22:00 and 06:00 on weekdays, cap it at 150MB per four hours, retry failures three times, shut the machine down when it drains.

Routes itself¶

A rule can send every .iso to one queue and folder, and every YouTube channel to a folder named after the channel, with captures doing the naming.

Crawls websites¶

Point it at a page and get back every PDF it links to, or mirror the whole site for reading offline and keep that copy current on a schedule.

Why a terminal download manager¶

A browser gives you one download at a time. No queue, no schedule, no retry, and no way to say "these thirty links, four at a time, tonight, capped at 2MB/s". Command line tools do all of that but leave you to remember the flags. muxget sits in between: the power of aria2c and yt-dlp, with a screen that shows you what is happening and keys that do the fiddly parts.

It runs over SSH, so the download manager on your home server or seedbox is the same one you use locally.

Get it running in a minute¶

# Arch
sudo pacman -S aria2 yt-dlp wget
cargo install --path .

# Debian or Ubuntu
sudo apt install aria2 yt-dlp wget
cargo install --path .

Prebuilt .deb, .rpm, AppImage, MSI and tarballs are on the releases page. Full steps are on the install page.

Where to go next¶

page	what is on it
Install	packages, requirements, command line flags
Getting started	the screen, moving around, the basics
Downloading	the add form, playlists, clipboard, credentials
Channel sync	keeping up with a channel you follow
Queues and schedules	slots, time windows, quotas, retries
Crawling websites	link discovery and offline mirrors
Routing rules	sending downloads to queues and folders by rule
Settings	backend flags, video quality, the log
Themes	six built in, and the eight colours behind them
Files on disk	where your state, rules and themes live
How it works	what happens underneath
Troubleshooting	when something does not download
Keyboard shortcuts	every key, in one table

muxget is MIT licensed and the source is on GitHub.