Steam TUI

About

Just a simple TUI client for steamcmd. Allows for the graphical launching, updating, and downloading of steam games through a simple terminal client. Methodology informed by steam-cli.

Note

Steam no longer has a backend only mode. This client has become more limited, but still potenitally useful for those who don't want to use the steam client.

Usage

Login with steamcmd first to cache your credentials (don't trust some random app with your passwords):

steamcmd
# Steam> login <user>
# Steam> quit

Launch the binary steam-tui, and rejoice 🎉. Help is in the client.

Unable to launch games? Pressing space will start a steam client and will let you launch games that need steam libraries or have some sort of DRM.

Warning

Still unable to launch games?

You are not alone, but gaming on linux is getting better. You can define a custom script to launch a specific game by creating $STEAM_TUI_SCRIPT_DIR/<game id>.sh, steam TUI will pass in the file it thinks should be run, but you can ignore this and just do whatever. This reduces steam-tui to more of a launcher, but it's better than nothing.

Features not in the help

It's like an Easter egg for reading documentation!

Favourites

Pressing f will toggle favourites on a game, pressing F will filter favourite games.

Hiding games

Pressing H will hide the selected game. Hidden games are recorded in ~/.config/steam-tui/config.json.

Showing other things (like demos)

You can enable (or hide by exclusion) Game DLC Driver Applications Config Demo Tool Unknown, by changing the allowed_games field in the config.

Requirements

steamcmd is required to launch steam-tui, as steam-tui is essentially just a graphical wrapper for this program. wine usage will be attempted if a native Linux game is not found.

Why ?

Because why not? Also, the Steam client seems to break on my Arch build. I have a GT 610, and barely anything graphical works- this is a nice work around.

Update, I got rid of the 610 (let's go 1660), but moved to NixOS and Wayland and the steam client still doesn't work lol.

Contributing

At this point, I am very much done with the project. I only really play Kerbal and 5 Dimensional Chess with Multiverse Time Travel, so additional work on this project is moot. If you buy me a coffee, I'd be happy to sink some more time into this.

Sponsors

Thank you to those who have heeded my call for more coffee!

• @abowen @KDanisme @jharlan-hash (sponsored major update 0.3.0)
• @MathiasSven (sponsored minor update 0.2.1)
• @vaelund (sponsored major update 0.2.0)

Missing Features

• Better handling for Proton games
• Filter for only showing installed games