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linecast

Weather, sunlight, tides, radar, the Moon, and maps — drawn for the terminal.

PyPI Python License: MIT

Terminal Trove Tool of The Week

linecast weather, sunshine, tides, and radar tiled on an Omarchy desktop

linecast turns free public data into six live, mouse-friendly terminal apps. It is pure Python, has no dependencies, adapts to your terminal theme, and needs no account or API key for its core experience.

Command What it shows
weather Current conditions, an hourly braille temperature curve, seven-day forecast, air quality, comparisons, and official alerts
sunshine The Sun moving across its daily arc, with sky gradients, day length, and moon phase
moon A shaded lunar disc, illumination, altitude, rise and set times, and the next full and new moons
tides A sunlight-shaded tide curve, current water level, and high and low times
radar Animated worldwide radar or satellite imagery, warning polygons, temperature, and wind
maps Detailed vector streets, terrain and bathymetry, a spinnable globe with live daylight and clouds, place search, and directions

Quick try

Run linecast immediately with uv, without installing it:

uvx linecast weather

Install

With uv:

uv tool install linecast

Or use Homebrew:

brew tap ashuttl/linecast
brew install linecast

pipx install linecast and pip install linecast work too. linecast requires Python 3.10+ on macOS or Linux.

Take it outside

weather
sunshine
moon
tides
radar
maps

Every command finds your approximate location from your IP address and opens in live mode when run in a terminal. Drag or scroll where it makes sense; each app shows its keyboard controls along the bottom.

Pass a place name or coordinates to go somewhere else:

weather --location "Québec"
radar --location 41.88,-87.63
maps --view terrain --location "Innsbruck"
maps --to "Portland Head Light" --profile bike

Use --print for one static frame. When output is piped, linecast does this automatically. Weather, sunshine, moon, and tides also offer --json and compact --oneline output for status bars.

If a short command name conflicts with something already on your system, everything also lives under the linecast namespace:

linecast weather --metric
linecast radar --theme rainbow
linecast maps --view terrain

A closer look

Weather

The weather dashboard combines current conditions, daylight-shaded hourly temperatures, precipitation, daily ranges, air quality, and natural-language comparisons. Official alerts are available across 36 countries and open to their full detail in live mode.

weather dashboard

Sunshine and Moon

sunshine is inspired by the Apple Watch Solar face. The arc and sky move through dawn, day, dusk, and night; day length includes its change from yesterday.

sunshine at midday sunshine at dusk

moon draws the current phase with its real terminator, mare shading, halo, and orientation for your hemisphere, then tells you what the Moon is doing next. Try moon --oneline for a status bar.

waxing gibbous Moon

Tides

The tide chart scrolls across several days and annotates exact highs, lows, and the current predicted water level. Coverage comes from NOAA in the US, the Canadian Hydrographic Service, and Queensland Open Data; anywhere else, the chart falls back to Open-Meteo's global tide model, so nearly any coastline works out of the box. An optional TideCheck key adds more named stations. Run tides --nearby to list the closest stations, or tides --station <id or name> to pin one.

tide chart

Radar

Radar animates recent observations and an hour of forecast over a braille basemap. LibreWXR supplies worldwide composites and fills gaps with model-derived precipitation; linecast adds time-synced US warning polygons, optional temperature and wind layers, 13 colour themes, and hourly infrared satellite imagery.

radar --theme rainbow
radar --layers temp,wind
radar --layer satellite

animated radar forecast over Glasgow

Maps

Street view renders OpenFreeMap vector tiles as solid water, land, parks, and buildings under a braille road network. Hover a feature to name and highlight it; search with /, ask for directions with d, or switch views with v. Directions open as a small panel: labelled from, to, and mode fields — each showing the key that edits it, and all clickable — above the turn-by-turn steps. Arrow (or click) through the maneuvers and the map flies along the route.

Terrain view turns global elevation into hillshade and a hypsometric ramp, from deep ocean trenches through lowland green to alpine white. Coastlines, borders, water, and cities are drawn over it in braille.

Zoom all the way out and either view becomes an orthographic globe you can rotate by dragging — or set spinning with r. Two keys switch on the sky as it is right now: s shades the planet into actual daylight, with a creeping terminator and cities glowing on the night side, and c lays the current global cloud cover over it from live satellite imagery. maps --view now opens straight to the full picture.

street map of Portland, Maine terrain map of the Alps around Innsbruck

maps --location "Portland, Maine" --zoom 0.01
maps --view terrain --location 60.4,5.3 --zoom 8
maps --view now
maps --from "Gorham, Maine" --to "Portland Head Light" --profile foot

Make it yours

Location

Save one location for every command:

linecast location set "Portland, Maine"
linecast location set 44.54,-68.42
linecast location
linecast location auto
linecast location search fayette

The setting lives in ~/.config/linecast/config.json. A command's --location flag or WEATHER_LOCATION takes precedence.

Language

Use --lang or LINECAST_LANG to localize the interface. Seventeen languages are supported:

English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian

weather --lang fr
radar --lang zh

Colour and icons

linecast queries the terminal palette so its colours belong in your theme. Set LINECAST_COLOR to truecolor, 256, 16, or none to override colour detection, or use the standard NO_COLOR variable. A Nerd Font gives the best icon rendering; --emoji or LINECAST_ICONS=emoji uses standard emoji instead.

Shell completion

# Bash
source <(linecast completion bash)

# Zsh
source <(linecast completion zsh)

# Fish
linecast completion fish | source

Completion covers both linecast <command> and the standalone commands.

Environment variables
Variable Description
WEATHER_LOCATION Default lat,lng for location-aware commands; overrides the saved location
WEATHER_UNITS metric for Celsius, km/h, and mm
TIDE_STATION Default tide station ID
TIDES_UNITS metric for tide heights in metres
LINECAST_TIDECHECK_KEY Optional TideCheck API key for global tide coverage
LINECAST_LANG UI language code: en, fr, es, de, it, pt, nl, pl, no, sv, is, da, fi, ja, ko, zh, or id
LINECAST_RADAR_THEME Default radar colour theme
LINECAST_LIBREWXR_URL Base URL of a self-hosted LibreWXR instance
LINECAST_ICONS emoji to use standard emoji instead of Nerd Font icons
LINECAST_COLOR auto, truecolor, 256, 16, or none
LINECAST_THEME auto (default), or classic / legacy / off for the fixed palette
LINECAST_THEME_TIMEOUT_MS Terminal palette query timeout in milliseconds (default 100)
NO_COLOR Any non-empty value disables ANSI colours
Data sources and coverage
  • WeatherOpen-Meteo for forecasts, geocoding, and air quality. Alerts come from the US National Weather Service, Environment Canada, China Meteorological Administration, DWD via Bright Sky, Met Éireann, Japan Meteorological Agency, MET Norway, and MeteoAlarm.
  • Sunshine and Moon — computed locally from astronomical equations.
  • Tides — NOAA CO-OPS, Canadian Hydrographic Service, Queensland Open Data, Open-Meteo's tide model as a global fallback, and optionally TideCheck.
  • RadarLibreWXR, with NEXRAD via Iowa Environmental Mesonet and RainViewer as fallbacks; warning polygons come from the US National Weather Service via IEM. The basemap is derived from Natural Earth.
  • Maps — terrain from AWS/Mapzen elevation tiles; streets and inland water from OpenFreeMap (© OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors); search from Photon and Nominatim; directions from FOSSGIS OSRM (© OpenStreetMap contributors); globe cloud cover from LibreWXR (CC BY 4.0) satellite imagery.

License

MIT

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