Ever want Twitch.tv streams in your launcher (Rofi)?

:author:

mcgillij

:category:

Linux

:date:

2022-07-18 22:49

:tags:

Linux, Rofi, Twitch, Launcher, i3

:slug:

rofi-wtwitch

:summary:

Here’s how I setup my Rofi and used wtwitch and mpv to play Twitch.tv streams.

:cover_image:

stream.png

Contents

Whats ROFI?

I use

Rofi

as my default launcher in my i3 configuration. It’s quite theme-able, and extendable to accommodate pretty much any use-case that you may have that supports outputting a "list".

It looks something like this.

[image: Rofi Launcher]

Rofi supports different “modes” which for me I can switch between them by pressing "shift + -> or <-" (arrow keys).

Rofi Twitch mode

If I switch it to the twitch mode it looks like:

[image: Rofi Launcher w/twitch]

Usually there would be a few other listings in there, but since it’s late when I took the screenshot. There are only a few people still streaming. But anyways you can manage your list with "wtwitch", which I will cover next.

wtwitch

You can find

wtwitch

or in the AUR repository.

Installing wtwitch can be done with the following incantation if you are on Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S wtwitch

Once this is installed you can use it to manage your list of streams.

[image: wtwitch]

Now that "wtwitch" is installed, you can start managing your **subscriptions** (note: these aren’t actual subscriptions in twitch, just a list of channels you want to see in your list).

Add each of the streams that you want to see with the following command:

wtwitch s Pestily

Where **Pestily** is the name of the stream.

Wrapping it up

Now we have all the moving parts, but we still need some glue between Rofi and wtwitch.

For me I created a small script "rt" (RofiTwitch), which just parses the output for Rofi and I stored that in "~/bin/rt".

"rt":

#!/bin/bash
# If nothing is passed in print a list of streams
if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    wtwitch check | sed -n '/Live/,/Offline/p' | sed '/Live channels/d;/Offline/d' | sed 's/\x1B\[[0-9;]\{1,\}[A-Za-z]//g;s/   //;'
else
    # if a param is passed in, open the stream
    name=$(echo "$1" | awk {'print $1'} | sed 's/\://')
    wtwitch w "$name" > /dev/null
fi

This script filters out all the offline streams from the output of "wtwitch" and then prints the output to the terminal, also when passed a parameter (the stream), it will start it up in MPV (for me, this is configurable with wtwitch).

Now in your i3 configuration, or where ever you instantiate your Rofi. You can add the following command.

# use ROFI instead of dmenu
bindsym $mod+space exec --no-startup-id "rofi -modi 'drun,run,window,rt:rt' -show drun -font 'Roboto 16' -show-icons"

Note the "rt:rt" command in the list of modi, this is in reference to the script above that does the munging of the stream lists.

Action screenshot

[image: Action screenshot]

Now this only gets you the video feed directly not the chat (but I see this as a good thing).