Check the Weather

After saving .wegorc, you can call up the weather forecast as a normal user by typing wego. The program references the file you just edited. If you want to discover what the weather is like elsewhere, enter wego <locatio> <[country]> <[days]> in a terminal window (Figure 3). If you do not specify a number, Wego starts with the current date and gives a preview for the next two days.

Figure 3: You see the weather for other locations if you enter the call parameters directly. If the temperature at the location is well below zero, you can read the output better against a light background.

Sometimes you need to play around a little and possibly omit the country or switch to a larger city nearby. This is true especially for sparsely populated or remote areas.

Along with cities, Wego also accepts IATA codes for airports. For example, wego BER gives you the weather forecast for the notorious Berlin Brandenburg airport (still incomplete), and wego NRT gives you Tokyo Narita. This feature can be useful: For example, typing LAX is faster than typing Los Angeles.

Alternatives

Other tools are available for displaying the weather at the command line. Another tool called Ansi-weather is quickly installed and offers useful options [2]. Because Ansi-weather comes with an API key, you won't need to complete online registration in order to use Ansi-weather. Using the Python Weather-CLI script [3] or the plain Weather [4] is even easier.

The fastest approach, however, is probably finger <city>@graph.no. This variant only requires that the finger utility is installed, which is the default for many distributions. The slightly cryptic output does require some patience and practice when you come to interpreting the information (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Even the 40-year-old finger Internet protocol lets you view the weather.

Conclusions

Checking weather has never been faster: Press F12 to drop the Yakuake [5] terminal, then type wego – you'll get to the weather in less than one second. Wego's ASCII art also has its charm. Command-line veterans will love this handy weather app, and Wego is also great for users who only occasionally launch a terminal.