linecast

Terminal weather, radar, solar arc, and tide visualizations. Pure Python, zero dependencies.

All data comes from free public APIs with no keys required.

Commands

weather — Current conditions, hourly braille temperature curve, 7-day forecast with color range bars, precipitation sparkline, natural language comparisons, and weather alerts for 36 countries. Available in 16 languages.

sunshine — Solar arc inspired by the Apple Watch Solar Graph face. Shows the sun's position on its daily arc with sky color gradients, day length with daily delta, and moon phase.

tides — NOAA tide predictions rendered as a sunlight-shaded braille chart with scrollable multi-day window, current water level, high/low extremes with timestamps, and mouse hover tooltips.

radar — Animated weather radar over a braille basemap. Powered by LibreWXR worldwide: real radar composites for North America (NOAA MRMS incl. Alaska/Hawaii, Environment Canada), Europe (OPERA, 24 countries), Japan, Taiwan and more, with model-derived precipitation filling the gaps everywhere else, 60 minutes of forecast frames, and 13 colour themes (Dark Sky by default; --theme rainbow, or press t in live mode to pick from a menu). Falls back automatically to NEXRAD via Iowa Environmental Mesonet (US) or RainViewer (global). Drag to pan anywhere in the world; the header names wherever you land ("23 mi NE of Boston" near shore, "Gulf of Maine" once offshore) from an offline Natural Earth index, and a crosshair marks the view centre. In the US, storm-based warning polygons (tornado red, severe thunderstorm yellow, flash flood green, marine orange, snow squall violet, emergencies magenta) are outlined over the echoes and rewind in sync with the radar timeline. Optional condition layers (--layers temp,wind, or press c/w in live mode) add a temperature tint beneath the geography and neutral wind arrows whose contrast tracks the speed — invisible in calm air, full text contrast in storm-force wind — sampled from Open-Meteo and time-synced to the displayed frame; rewinding the radar rewinds them too.

Like the rest of linecast, radar speaks all 16 languages — here looping the forecast over Qingdao with --lang zh:

maps — Terrain and bathymetry, no weather at all. Hillshaded elevation from the AWS/Mapzen terrain tiles (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1) painted as a hypsometric ramp — lowland green through alpine white above sea level, deepening bathymetric blues below it — with the coastlines, borders, and city labels rendered in braille over the fill. Drag to pan, +/- to zoom, hover to read the elevation under the pointer.

All five launch in full-screen live mode by default when run in a terminal (auto-refreshing, with keyboard navigation). Use --print for a single static snapshot printed to stdout. When piped, --print behavior is automatic.

Install

pip install linecast

Or with a Homebrew tap:

brew tap ashuttl/linecast
brew install linecast

Usage

weather                          # current location via IP geolocation
weather --location "new york"    # search by place name (uses top result)
weather --location 44.54,-68.42  # specific coordinates
weather --search québec          # find coordinates by city name
weather --metric                 # metric units (°C, km/h, mm)
weather --celsius                # celsius only (wind/precip stay imperial)
weather --metric --fahrenheit    # °F with km/h and mm
weather --lang fr                # UI in French (also covers alert text when available)
# other language codes: es, de, it, pt, nl, pl, no, sv, is, da, fi, ja, ko, zh
weather --print                  # single static snapshot (no live mode)
sunshine                         # solar arc (live by default)
sunshine --print                 # static snapshot
sunshine --classic-colors        # use fixed-color (theme agnostic) sunshine gradient/palette

tides                            # nearest NOAA station (live by default)
tides --station "Bar Harbor"     # search by station name (uses first match)
tides --station 8413320          # specific station ID
tides --search "Bar Harbor"      # find stations by name
tides --metric                   # heights in meters instead of feet
tides --lang fr                  # UI in French
tides --print                    # static snapshot

radar                            # current location via IP geolocation
radar --location "chicago"       # search by place name
radar --location 41.88,-87.63    # specific coordinates
radar --search denver            # find coordinates by city name
radar --zoom 12                  # zoom out (degrees of latitude shown, default 6)
radar --theme rainbow            # colour theme (or press t in live mode)
radar --layers temp,wind         # temperature tint + wind arrows (or press c/w)
radar --print                    # static snapshot

maps                             # terrain around the current location
maps --location "Innsbruck"      # the Alps
maps --location 60.4,5.3 --zoom 8  # Norwegian fjords and the North Sea trench
maps --print                     # static snapshot

Language support

Use --lang or set LINECAST_LANG to switch the full UI into another language. This covers weather descriptions, day names, natural language comparisons, precipitation forecasts, and alert timing. Non-English languages also use 24-hour time.

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

All commands are also available under the linecast namespace if the short names conflict with other tools on your system:

linecast weather
linecast sunshine --print
linecast tides --station 8413320
linecast radar --theme rainbow

Shell completion

Generate shell completion from the CLI:

# Bash
source <(linecast completion bash)

# Zsh
source <(linecast completion zsh)

# Fish
linecast completion fish | source

This installs completions for both linecast <command> and standalone weather, tides, sunshine, and radar.

Weather alerts

Alerts are sourced automatically based on location from eight providers covering 36 countries:

• US — National Weather Service
• Canada — Environment and Climate Change Canada
• China — China Meteorological Administration
• Germany — Deutscher Wetterdienst (via BrightSky)
• Ireland — Met Éireann
• Japan — Japan Meteorological Agency
• Norway — MET Norway
• 29 European countries — MeteoAlarm (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK)

Alert text comes from each national weather service in its native language. When available, alerts are served in your --lang preference.

Environment variables

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• A terminal with ANSI color support (truecolor looks best; weather remains usable in low/no color)
• A Nerd Font for best icon rendering (optional — use --emoji for standard emoji fallback)
• macOS or Linux (uses termios for live mode)

Data sources

• Weather — Open-Meteo (forecast, geocoding, air quality); alerts from the US NWS, Environment Canada, Bright Sky (DWD), MET Norway, and Met Éireann
• Tides — NOAA CO-OPS (US), Canadian Hydrographic Service, Queensland Open Data (AU), and TideCheck
• Sunshine — computed locally from NOAA's solar position equations (no API)
• Radar — global radar, forecast frames and colour themes by LibreWXR (data CC BY 4.0; aggregates NOAA MRMS, Environment Canada, EUMETNET OPERA, JMA, CWA, MET Malaysia and ECMWF-based model precipitation; set LINECAST_LIBREWXR_URL to use a self-hosted instance); fallbacks: NEXRAD via Iowa State University's Iowa Environmental Mesonet (US) and RainViewer; NWS storm-based warning polygons via IEM; basemap geography from Natural Earth

License

MIT