YouTube Search

Search YouTube directly from the Noctalia launcher and open a selected video in your default browser or other xdg-open handler.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	notfinaldev/youtube-search
Entries	Launcher provider: youtube
Launcher Prefix	/yt

Requirements

Install both dependencies on PATH:

• yt-dlp searches YouTube and returns the video metadata.
• xdg-open opens the selected YouTube video with the system's registered URL handler.

Usage

1. Open the Noctalia launcher.
2. Type /yt followed by a search query, for example /yt ambient coding.
3. Choose one of the returned videos to open https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>&autoplay=1 through xdg-open.

The provider returns at most five results. Each result shows its title and, when available, the channel and formatted duration. Empty queries clear the result list. A missing yt-dlp, search failure, malformed search response, or no matches is shown in the launcher as a status row.

Notes

Network and filesystem effects

• Every non-empty query starts yt-dlp with a YouTube search for up to five videos. This sends the query to YouTube and lets yt-dlp make the network requests needed to retrieve search metadata.
• For each displayed video whose thumbnail is not already cached, the plugin downloads https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<video-id>/hqdefault.jpg.
• Thumbnails are stored below the plugin directory at cache/youtube/<video-id>.jpg. The plugin creates cache/youtube when it first needs to cache a thumbnail. Cached thumbnails are reused by later searches and are not automatically removed.

Processes and playback

• Searches run the equivalent of yt-dlp --ignore-config --no-warnings --flat-playlist --dump-single-json 'ytsearch5:<query>' asynchronously with a 15-second timeout. The query is shell-quoted before it is passed to the command.
• Activating a video runs xdg-open asynchronously for that video's YouTube watch URL with autoplay=1; its standard output and standard error are discarded. xdg-open delegates playback to the system's configured handler, normally a browser. Whether playback actually starts automatically depends on that handler and its autoplay policy.