helm-twitch.el

In the spirit of doing as much as possible inside Emacs, this package provides a means of checking whether your favourite Twitch.tv streamer is online, using the Helm framework. It's as simple as M-x helm-twitch.

You can open live streams in the browser, or join the streamer's Twitch chat directly in Emacs through erc.

This package also contains a special livestreamer-mode that supports opening streams with Livestreamer, for those of us who want to avoid playback in the browser itself.

Usage

Calling helm-twitch interactively will display a Helm buffer containing the top live streams on Twitch.tv at present. Entering a pattern in the minibuffer will search for live streams and channels using the Twitch.tv API. The default action for these streams and channels is to open them in a browser.

Customizing

helm-twitch has very few customization parameters. The most immediately useful one is twitch-game-type, which you can use to narrow the stream results to a particular game. For example:

(setq twitch-game-type "League of Legends")

If you would like to connect to Twitch chat directly in Emacs, you will need to set the helm-twitch-username and helm-twitch-oauth-token variables. For example:

(setq helm-twitch-username "[REDACTED]"
	  helm-twitch-oauth-token "oauth:8lgmfrplmxw65qkjml5lg41z36u9ga")

You can get an OAUTH token for this purpose here.

helm-twitch also defines a few faces, which are modelled after the Zenburn colours by default. You can change them by modifying

• helm-twitch-streamer-face,
• helm-twitch-viewers-face,
• helm-twitch-status-face, and
• helm-twitch-prefix-face

All of which have self-explanitory names.

Using Livestreamer

Using Twitch.tv Credentials with livestreamer.el

As a result of the now-required authentication for all Twitch.tv API calls (circa September 2016), Livestreamer now requires an OAuth token to play Twitch.tv streams. Luckily, it's easy to achieve this by adding this credential (which is the same as the one required by twitch-api-oauth-token as explained above) to your custom livestreamer-opts. For example:

(setq livestreamer-opts
      (concat "--twitch-oauth-token " twitch-api-oauth-token " "
              livestreamer-opts))

See also the Twitch.tv blog post.

Why Helm?

Helm is not the only completion framework available for Emacs. Many users prefer the ivy ecosystem, and I am not opposed to porting the code for use within that ecosystem. However, helm-twitch makes extensive use of Helm's capacity to have multiple "sources" for a single completion, and this makes it difficult to imagine doing so. Contributions are very welcome!

License

This project is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or greater. See the LICENSE file for details.