A little Rust program that fetches plaintext lyrics from genius.com and dumps them to the terminal, potential successor of https://github.com/raymon-roos/lyrical-php.

Back when I used to use foobar2000, (in a deep, dark past where I used Windows...), I loved having a lyrics panel plugin. Lyrics are a large part of what I enjoy in songs.

My music player of choice these days is cmus. I haven't found a convenient lyrics program that runs in the terminal yet, so I made my own. Though as yet its features are limited.

• Rust & cargo, v1.83
• OpenSSL with headers are required on linux¹ (they're already included in the Nix shell).
• Crates used: reqwest for sending HTTP requests, serde_json for de-serialising JSON, scraper for parsing HTML.

1. Create a genius account.
2. Create an API client: https://genius.com/api-clients. Just fill in some random things, it doesn't matter for this program.
3. Generate an access token for your "client" and save it to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lyrical/token. Maybe make the file only readable and writeable by your own user.

Try out without installing:

nix run 'github:raymon-roos/lyrical-rs' --artist 'windmills' --title 'true natural'
# See all available options:
nix run 'github:raymon-roos/lyrical-rs' --help

Install into home-manager or system configuration using flakes:

# flake.nix:
inputs = {
  lyrical.url = "github:raymon-roos/lyrical-rs";
  lyrical.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
}

# home-manager configuration:
home.packages = [
    inputs.lyrical.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
];

# Alternatively, NixOS system configuration:
environment = {
  systemPackages = [
    inputs.lyrical.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
  ];

1. Clone this repo to a location of your choice.
2. Make sure you have the OpenSSL headers installed, as per ¹
3. Run cargo install --path . (make sure that $CARGO_HOME/bin is in your $PATH)

lyrical-rs --help

Available options:

--help                       Print this help text and exit.
--title  <title>  (required) Title of the song to search lyrics for.
--artist <artist> (optional) Restrict search results by the name of the
                             song's artist.
--url    <url>    (optional) Rather than searching, fetch lyrics from this
                             genius.com url directly. If present, `--artist`,
                             `--title` and `--list` will be ignored.
--list   [count]  (optional) Print list of [count] (default 20) genius.com search
                             results, rather than song lyrics. Useful for
                             further filtering, manually or through external tools.

Example

lyrical-rs --artist 'Sleep Token' --title 'Euclid' --list
lyrical-rs --url 'https://genius.com/The-arcadian-wild-wander-wonder-lyrics'

I use a bash script to get the currently playing song in cmus and to save the lyrics to a file. For inspiration, see https://github.com/raymon-roos/scripts/blob/main/lyrics_in_terminal.sh. That way I can use fd for searching files, rather than implementing my own file searching algorithm. This whole thing could be a bash script, if you can find a good way to parse HTML…

Eventually I might combine multiple sources for lyrics, support multiple music players, add time cues (karaoke mode), and make the program interactive to allow for more advanced features. We'll see…