You browse youtube with Emacs? How do you see the thumbnails (or don't you care)?

Not quite. Late last year I began running a Searx instance locally, less for privacy than for having a hackable meta-search engine. Since it supports several "bangs," like !ddg and !yt and the like, I generally use this for quickly searching Youtube without changing context. When I enable images [0], I can see the thumbnails just fine. Regardless, there are plenty of places on the web (like here) where people will post interesting YT links, and having them pop open in mpv is a good default [1].

I've also evolved a CLI YT client, based on mpv/yt-dlp and fzf; it does not show thumbnails. Even so, it's perfectly fine for gathering lots of search results, like

  $ yt 500 medical uses for hollandaise

which will gather the first 500 results about medical hollandaise [1], filter out the shorts, and present the remaining results in an fzf-based UI. I haven't really missed the thumbnails.

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[0] One of the first things I did with eww was to bind "I" to a function that toggles images on or off and re-displays the current page.

[1] In my setup, I can override all special handling of a URL by holding Ctrl while hitting Enter to follow a link.

[2] Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with TinyLLama about the medical uses of hollandaise and options for regulating it. Did you know that it can be taken intravenously to help fight cancer?

fzf looks interesting, I'll check it out.