Emacs · vertico + marginalia · prototype

Radio-browser station lookup — how the screens read

One command, cj/music-radio-search, taking you from a query to audio. These are faithful mockups of the four minibuffer screens, drawn with a real live search for jazz (results sorted by popularity). Everything is monospace because it all lives in the minibuffer.

The one real design choice is the station line: what metadata rides alongside the name, and in what order. Step 2 shows two variants — pick one.

Bound next to R in the playlist keymap. You type a name or keyword; Enter fires the search.

vertico lists the matches; marginalia annotates each on the right, dimmed. The current row carries the gold highlight. Codec and bitrate tell you the quality; ♥ is radio-browser votes, ▶ is play count — both proxies for “is this station any good.”

Same list, but the annotation trades ▶plays for the station’s top tags — more help telling two same-named stations apart by what they actually play, at the cost of a wider line.

It’s completing-read-multiple: TAB marks a row (red bullet, name stays lit), and one search can create several stations at once. Here three are marked; Enter creates all three.

Each pick is written as an .m3u into the MPD playlist directory (Decision 3), then enqueued and started through mpv (Decision 4) — the search ends in sound. The echo area confirms; the three land in the playlist, the first now playing.