Ansiweather: Weather in the Terminal

Productivity Sauce

Sometimes the simplest tool can also prove to be an indispensable one. Take Ansiweather, for example: this one-trick pony displays the current weather conditions and forecast right in the terminal, and that's all it does. But if your daily computing revolves around the terminal, having the ability to view weather info from the command line can come in rather handy.

Ansiweather depends on a few packages which are available in the official software repositories of most mainstream Linux distributions. To install them on Ubuntu and its derivatives, run the sudo apt-get install curl jq bc command, and you are done. Clone then the project's GitHub repository, and use the following commands to copy the ansiweather script to the /usr/local/bin/ directory and change the script's ownership and permissions:

sudo cp ansiweather /usr/local/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/ansiweather
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/ansiweather

Run then the ansiweather command to view current weather conditions. By default, Ansiweather displays weather info for your current location, but you can use the -l parameter to check the weather in other cities, for example: weather -l berlin. To view a 5-day forecast, use the -F switch. Instead of specifying parameters on the fly, you can create a configuration file, and the README file explains how to do that.