In the spirit of using this site as my public facing notebook. I sharing with you and future me, what might be, the most beautiful terminal based weather forecast application wttr.in. Rather than babble endlessly about all my reasons for my love for the terminal, I am going to link you here to my Tmux blathering.
There is nothing to install, unless you don’t have curl but that is pretty standard fare on a modern Linux distribution. If you do not have curl, please consult your distribution instructions on getting it installed as with openSUSE it is there automatically.
I also want to note, most people, normal people, will just glance at their phone and be done with it. I, however, am not most normal people as the mobile form factor is not my favorite place to do anything.
How to Use It
Since there is nothing to install, this is a down and dirty on how you use it. You can get all the details by going to the project GitHub site and learn much more about its extended features, extensive options, and details of its inner workings.
The easiest way to view this weather information can be done just by navigating to the the website which will display the information in your browser. This is not personally interesting to me but possibly the best options available for viewing the weather.
The more fun way to view the weather is right there in the terminal. Open you favorite terminal emulator or drop down into a TTY and it works.
This is all you have to do and it will just give you weather information.
curl wttr.in
It will use your IP to get the weather near you. For most people, this will probably be good enough.
For those that use a VPN may find that this doesn’t work for them. In this case you will have to specify the specific location where you want the weather forecast. Spectacularly, you can use the city name or the postal code. For example
curl wttr.in/kalamazoo
works just as well as
curl wttr.in/49001
Something of note, cities in the USA or across the world are not exactly unique. If I wanted the weather of Portage, MI and just typed
curl wttr.in/portage
I would get Portage, Indiana, presumably because it may be geographically closer to my location than Portage, Michigan. To be more specific, the appropriate syntax is this:
curl wttr.in/portage+michigan
Display Units
WTTR.in is set to default to your regional unit format but this can be over ridden. This can be done with adding ?u for USCS used in the United States or ?m for the rest of the world. An example of how that would be used to get metric in the United States.
curl wttr.in/kalamazoo?m
Final Thoughts
What is very cool about this, up to date weather information is readily available to any computer with a terminal, internet connection and curl which is what makes this very interesting and useful to me. It is a service that does not limit or wall off anything. It is there to be used.
I am only scratching the very surface of this incredibly versatile terminal weather application. It should be noted that because it is a terminal application and is extensible, you can very much make it more than just a basic text-based output. For my purposes, today, this is all I want but with a little imagination, marvelous things can be done with it.
This small blathering is very much for me, as I do recall this application from years back but have since forgotten the details about it. In my not so recent searching for terminal weather applications didn’t present this information so this is my gift to you and future me.
References
WTTR.in Project GitHub Page
Tmux Desktop on openSUSE Linux
Terminal Weather in the Browser
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