yoinks

yoinks is a friendlier face for yt-dlp, the command-line downloader that grabs video and audio from YouTube and 1,800-plus other sites. Paste a link, pick a resolution or MP3 from a menu, done. It even spots a URL already sitting on your clipboard. MIT licensed. Install with npm install -g yoinks or just run npx yoinks.

Node 18+ is the only requirement. It uses a yt-dlp you already have, or downloads the standalone binary into ~/.yoinks/bin on first run, and bundles ffmpeg if you don't have it, so there's no Python toolchain to manage. Files always land in ~/Downloads with no option to change that, and there's no playlist support. Occasional downloaders who hate relearning flags will like it. Anyone scripting downloads should call yt-dlp directly. Free at any scale.

The catch: yoinks downloads its copy of yt-dlp once and never updates it. YouTube changes something every few weeks, yt-dlp ships a fix, and yoinks keeps running the old binary, which matches the 403 and format errors users have reported since July. Install yt-dlp yourself and keep it current, since yoinks prefers a system copy. The project was built in two days in July, hasn't had a commit since, and has never merged a community pull request.