Skip the Fake Download Buttons: A Torrent Finder That Lives in Your Terminal
You know the drill. You're looking for a torrent, and suddenly you're playing whack-a-mole with fake download buttons, dodging popups that spawn two more tabs, and then discovering that half the results have zero seeders anyway. It's exhausting. torlink is a torrent finder that runs entirely in your terminal, and it asks for exactly zero configuration to get going.
What It Does
torlink is a terminal-based torrent finder that searches a short, curated list of sources all at once. Type in what you're after, and results stream in from every source as they respond, each tagged with file size and seeder count so you can tell what'll actually come down fast. From there, arrow to your pick and hit d to save it, or shift+d to drop it somewhere other than your default downloads folder.
The whole thing is built on Node, which is the only dependency you'll need. It opens straight to a search bar, and you can interact with it entirely through keypresses—no commands to memorize. Pressing ? brings up the full list whenever you forget something. Downloads run in the background while you keep searching, so you can queue up as many as you want, and anything interrupted picks up where it left off when you return.
Why It's Cool
It's genuinely zero-setup. The install instructions are three steps, and the third is npx torlnk. That's it. No config files, no API keys, no package managers beyond Node itself.
The curated source list is a deliberate design choice. Rather than scraping the entire web, torlink searches a hand-picked set: FitGirl for games, YTS, The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and BitTorrented for movies, EZTV and Nyaa and SubsPlease for TV and anime. Games get special treatment—they're the only category that can run code, so they come from FitGirl alone, a repacker with a long track record. Everything else is just video and subtitles. That's a thoughtful line to draw.
Resilient searching. If one source is down, the search carries on without it, and torlink tells you which one is offline. You're not left staring at a spinner wondering what broke.
The downloads pane actually stays tidy. Active downloads sit at the top with progress, speed, and time left. Finished ones drop into a "Recently downloaded" section below. When a download finishes, it keeps seeding automatically so the next person can find it—and there's a Seeding tab where you can pause or stop that anytime.
Small touches that add up. Download a course split into modules and torlink drops a playlist.m3u into any folder holding more than one video or track, so it plays straight through in order. Don't want that? Run torlnk --no-playlist. You can also paste a magnet link, a bare infohash, or drag a .torrent file onto the window—or just press Enter on an empty search box to browse the curated library.
There's a headless mode. For servers and seedboxes, torlink runs without the TUI: torlnk search "<query>", torlnk seed <path>, torlnk watch <dir>, torlnk serve, torlnk files, and torlnk attach for keeping the TUI alive across ssh sessions. The README also mentions a --daemon flag (though it's truncated there, so you'll want to check the repo for the full picture).
How to Try It
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Install Node from nodejs.org—that's the only requirement.
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Open your terminal.
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Run:
npx torlnk
That's the whole setup. Once it's open, type a search and press Enter, or hit Enter on an empty box to browse. Arrow to a result and press d to download, shift+d to choose a folder for that one download, or o to change your default download location. Press ? anytime for the full keymap.
Head to the repository for the complete documentation, including the headless commands and the --daemon details the README cuts off.
Final Thoughts
torlink won't replace a full-featured torrent client, and it's not trying to. What it does is remove the friction from the part everyone dreads—finding something worth downloading without wading through a minefield of fake buttons. It's best suited to people who already live in the terminal and want their downloads to feel like just another command, and to anyone running a seedbox who wants a scriptable, JSON-outputting search tool. If that's you, the barrier to entry here is about as low as it gets: one command, no config, and ? when you get lost.
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