acat

cat prints files. acat plays them. That's the whole idea. I built it today, and I've been smiling about it all afternoon. Why I had a recording of an X Space I'd hosted, sitting in my home directory as an mp4. I wanted to listen to it. Not open an app, not drag it into a window, not wait for something with a library and an account to wake up. I just wanted to hear it, from the place I already was: my terminal. So I typed what felt natural: acat song.mp3 And then I made it work. (The first thing it ever played was that recorded Space. It's a good test. It's long, it's a video file, and I actually wanted to hear it.) What It Does It behaves the way you'd expect something named after cat to behave. Give it a file, and it plays. Give it several, and it plays them one after another, the same way cat concatenates. Pipe something into it, and stdin works too. Videos play their audio track: mp4, mov, mkv, webm, avi, and friends. That was the case I cared about most, and it's the one most…