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

Quick try

Run linecast immediately with uv, without installing it:

uvx linecast weather

Any of the six commands above works in place of weather.

Or with nothing but curl — get.sh uses whatever the machine has, down to plain python3:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashuttl/linecast/main/get.sh | sh

It opens weather in live mode; name another tool with sh -s sunshine, or pass flags with sh -s -- --metric. When nothing else is available, the script keeps a small private environment for linecast in your cache directory and checks for a newer release once a day.

Install

With uv:

uv tool install linecast

Or use Homebrew:

brew tap ashuttl/linecast
brew install linecast

On Arch, there is a community-maintained AUR package:

yay -S linecast

pipx install linecast and pip install linecast work too. linecast requires Python 3.10+ on macOS, Linux or Windows (Windows Terminal; Git Bash and mintty see a pipe, not a terminal, so they get static output).

On Windows it also installs tzdata (Windows has no IANA time zone database) and truststore (TLS verification through the OS certificate store). Icons default to emoji in Windows Terminal; with a Nerd Font installed and selected, linecast icons nerd switches to the full set.

Take it outside

linecast weather
linecast sunshine
linecast moon
linecast tides
linecast radar
linecast maps

Every command opens in live mode when run in a terminal, at the city your IP address suggests unless you have saved a location. 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:

linecast weather --location "Québec"
linecast radar --location 41.88,-87.63
linecast maps --view terrain --location "Innsbruck"
linecast 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.

Prefer the short spellings? The names are yours, not linecast's, so they never collide with anything else on your system. linecast link makes weather, sunshine, moon, tides, radar and maps as links beside the linecast binary, skipping any name something else already owns; linecast link --remove takes them away again. A shell alias does the same job:

alias weather='linecast weather' radar='linecast radar'

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.

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.

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 linecast moon --oneline for a status bar.

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, Queensland Open Data, and the Hong Kong Observatory; 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 linecast tides --nearby to list the closest stations, or linecast tides --station <id or name> to pin one.

Radar

Radar animates recent observations and an hour of forecast over a braille basemap. Real radar is only available where a public network publishes an open composite — North America, Europe, and parts of East and Southeast Asia. Elsewhere LibreWXR fills in with a precipitation model, which looks smoother and blockier than radar; the footer says so when that is what you are seeing. On top of the frames, linecast draws US warning polygons that follow the timeline, optional temperature and wind layers, and hourly infrared satellite imagery.

The default theme uses colors from your terminal's color scheme to draw rain radar data on the map. If your theme is monochrome, the radar data will be too. In addition to the default theme, there are a handful of other local themes — dusk, ember, ink, and marangai — and you can also choose from LibreWXR's server-rendered themes. Press t to switch.

linecast radar --theme dusk
linecast radar --layers temp,wind
linecast radar --layer satellite

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 panel of turn-by-turn steps; arrow (or click) through them 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. linecast maps --view now opens straight to the full picture.

Everything is a single key — ? shows this list in the app:

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

Make it yours

Settings live in ~/.config/linecast/config.json. For any of them, a command-line flag beats an environment variable, which beats the saved setting.

Location

Save one location for every command:

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

set takes a place name — it is geocoded once, on the spot, and the first match is saved — or exact lat,lng coordinates; search lists the candidates when the first match might not be the right one. A command's --location flag or WEATHER_LOCATION takes precedence. With no location saved or passed, linecast falls back to IP geolocation: a single anonymous request to ipinfo.io, which returns the rough position of your network connection — usually the right city, sometimes the wrong one, and off by a lot on a VPN or corporate network. The answer is cached for an hour; saving a location, or setting any override, means the request is never made. Times follow the location: point linecast sunshine or linecast moon somewhere across an ocean and sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset come back in that place's local clock.

Units

Metric is the default — imperial in the United States, judged by the saved location or, failing that, the machine's IP — and either can be pinned for every command:

linecast units metric
linecast units imperial
linecast units
linecast units auto

Every view command takes --metric and --imperial; weather adds --celsius and --fahrenheit for the temperature alone. LINECAST_UNITS sets units for every command; WEATHER_UNITS and TIDES_UNITS override it for their one command.

Clock

The clock follows the country: 12-hour in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the other places that write 6:50 pm, 24-hour everywhere else. Pin either for every command:

linecast clock 12
linecast clock 24
linecast clock
linecast clock auto

The time-showing commands take --12h and --24h for one run, and LINECAST_CLOCK sets it in the environment.

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

linecast weather --lang fr
linecast radar --lang zh

Color and icons

linecast queries the terminal palette so its colors belong in your theme. Set LINECAST_COLOR to truecolor, 256, 16, or none to override color detection, or use the standard NO_COLOR variable.

Icons come in three sets. Nerd Font glyphs are used automatically in terminals that bundle them (WezTerm, kitty, Ghostty); other interactive terminals get emoji, and piped or redirected output falls back to plain Unicode, whose glyphs are one cell wide everywhere. A terminal cannot say what font it is drawing with, so if you have a Nerd Font in Alacritty, foot, or iTerm2, say so once:

linecast icons nerd
linecast icons emoji
linecast icons plain
linecast icons
linecast icons auto

--icons and LINECAST_ICONS pick a set for one run, and linecast doctor shows a glyph from each so you can see what your font renders.

Shell completion

# Bash
source <(linecast completion bash)

# Zsh
source <(linecast completion zsh)

# Fish
linecast completion fish | source

# Nushell
linecast completion nu | save -f ~/.config/nushell/completions/linecast_completions.nu
# in config.nu:
use ~/.config/nushell/completions/linecast_completions.nu *

Completion covers linecast <command> and the short names, for anyone who aliased or symlinked them.

When something looks wrong

linecast doctor
linecast doctor --offline
linecast doctor --json

linecast doctor reports the build, the settings and cache paths, what the terminal advertised, which settings are in force and where each came from, and whether each data provider answered. Secrets show as "(set)", never their value. --offline skips the probes; --json is the thing to paste into a bug report.

The six view commands and linecast doctor take --debug, which prints one line on stderr for each fallback taken along the way — a provider that did not answer, a tile that would not decode — and what was shown instead. URLs are reduced to scheme, host, and path.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md says how to run the suite and what a change should look like, and ARCHITECTURE.md is the map of the code.

Lineage

Prior art.

A Telic-Alcatel videotex terminal draws the weather, circa 1990. Photograph from the collection at minitel-alcatel.fr.

License

MIT