ncurses PulseAudio Mixer

An ncurses mixer for PulseAudio inspired by pavucontrol.

Config

Your configuration gets created on first run. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined then it will be created at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ncpamixer.conf otherwise $HOME/.ncpamixer.conf

Custom colors? Why not!

ncpamixer supports 256 colors. You can change them in ncpamixer.conf

Custom bindings? Sure!

You find them in ncpamixer.conf

Default bindings

Event	Default	Description
switch	tab	Cycle trought sinks, outputs, profile and ports
select	enter	Select option in dropdowns
quit	escape	Quit
quit	q	Quit
dropdown	c	Open dropdown for selecting sinks, outputs, profile and ports
mute	m	Mute selected item
set_default	d	Set default sink/source
volume_up	l	Increase volume on selected item
volume_down	h	Decrease volume on selected item
volume_up	arrow right	Increase volume on selected item
volume_down	arrow left	Decrease volume on selected item
move_up	k	Move up
move_down	j	Move down
move_up	arrow up	Move up
move_down	arrow down	Move down
page_up	page up	Previous page in dropdown
page_down	page down	Next page in dropdown
tab_next	L	Next tab
tab_prev	H	Previous tab
tab_playback	F1	Jump to playback tab
tab_recording	F2	Jump to recording tab
tab_output	F3	Jump to output tab
tab_input	F4	Jump to input tab
tab_config	F5	Jump to configuration tab
move_last	G	Move to last item
move_first	g	Move to first item
set_volume_0	0	Set volume to 0%
set_volume_10	1	Set volume to 10%
set_volume_20	2	Set volume to 20%
set_volume_30	3	Set volume to 30%
set_volume_40	4	Set volume to 40%
set_volume_50	5	Set volume to 50%
set_volume_60	6	Set volume to 60%
set_volume_70	7	Set volume to 70%
set_volume_80	8	Set volume to 80%
set_volume_90	9	Set volume to 90%
help	?	Pop up with keycode information
set_volume_100	Unbound	Set volume to 100%
toggle_static	Unbound	Toggle barmode static/none static

Dependencies

• PulseAudio :alien:
• ncurses

Build dependencies

• CMake
• C++14 compatible compiler
• Pandoc for manpages

On Debian(-based) systems, you'd need libncurses-dev and libpulse-dev.

On Fedora system, you'd need ncurses-devel and pulseaudio-libs-devel.

Building

• In the main directory, run make
• On some systems (tested on Debian-stable), you may need to instead run make USE_WIDE=True
• The above command is needed to get UTF-8 support; it will cause CMake to look for the ncursesw library, and it'll link to it with -lncursesw
• (This also means you might have to first rm build/CMakeCache.txt if you ran make without using the USE_WIDE setting, so it'll re-generate the Makefile)

Install

Arch Linux

packer -S ncpamixer-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ncpamixer-git/

Gentoo ebuild

https://github.com/fulhax/fulhax-overlay/tree/master/media-sound/ncpamixer

Tested on

• Gentoo + cachyos-kernel 6.13.7, PipeWire 1.4.1 and ncurses 6.5_p20250308
• Gentoo kernel 4.12.10, PulseAudio 11.0 and ncurses 6.0-r1
• Gentoo kernel 4.6.2, PulseAudio 9.0 and ncurses 6.0-r1
• Arch Linux 4.6.4-1 PulseAudio 9.0 and ncurses 6.0-4
• Fedora kernel 4.18.10-200, PulseAudio 12.2 and ncurses 6.1-5

License

MIT