Torrenting from your terminal 💻

One of my favorite ways to torrent is by using lynx 🐆 along with rtorrent 🌊 to effortlessly download and then torrent files using only my terminal window.

The benefits of using lynx to source torrents are:

• you can manually choose what cookies are saved to your computer (easily tap N to deny all cookies from a domain)

• javascript is disabled

• no obscene advertisements / malvertisements are shown to you, which are usually common on torrent search engines

• vim bindings 💪 (if you want them)

The basics of using lynx is something like this:

To get to the torrent website:

lynx anytorrentwebsite.com

Once you are at the download page, you only have to press D to download the torrent file.

You can then press q to close lynx.

The directory which you called lynx from in your terminal will be the directory that the .torrent file is saved to.

From there, you can call rtorrent with the .torrent file as your argument.

E.g.

rtorrent download.torrent

Then press up arrow key to select the torrent followed by ctrl-s to start the torrent.

Once the file is 100% downloaded, (it will say), press ctrl-q to quit rtorrent.

If you have IINA installed, and what you downloaded was a video file, then you can call:

open -a IINA {video-directory}

This will start your movie 🍿.

Enjoy