linecast turns free public data into six live, mouse-friendly terminal apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows. It is pure Python with no third-party dependencies (two on Windows), tries to match your terminal theme, and needs no accounts or API keys.

Install

brew install linecast

Or with uv:

uv tool install linecast

pipx install linecast and pip install linecast work too, and Arch has a community-maintained AUR package. linecast needs Python 3.10 or newer on macOS, Linux, or Windows.

To try it before installing anything:

uvx linecast weather

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

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

It opens weather; name another tool with sh -s sunshine, or pass flags with sh -s -- --metric.

Using it

Every command opens in live mode when run in a terminal, set to where your IP address says you are unless you have saved a location.

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

--print gives one static frame, and piped output gets one automatically. Weather, sunshine, moon, and tides also have --json, and a short --oneline for status bars.

A closer look

Weather

The dashboard combines current conditions, hourly temperatures shaded by daylight, precipitation, daily ranges, air quality, and a line on how today compares with a normal day. Official alerts cover 45 countries; click one to read it in full, or press o to open it in your browser. In India, air quality is shown on the CPCB's National AQI scale.

Sunshine and Moon

sunshine is inspired by the Apple Watch Solar face. The arc and sky move through dawn, day, dusk, and night, and the day length comes with how much longer or shorter it is than yesterday.

linecast sunshine --year draws a whole year instead of one day. Each column is a day, running from midnight at the top to midnight at the bottom, and every point in it takes the color of the sky at that hour. Sunrise and sunset are not drawn as lines; they are where the night colors meet the day colors. Point at a day to see its sunrise, sunset and day length, along with the time and the sky under the pointer. In live mode, y switches between the day view and the year view. --dst plots each day in its own clock, so the clock changes show as steps.

Near the poles the same chart turns into polar night and midnight sun. These are Longyearbyen and Vostok Station, at 78° north and 78° south.

moon draws the current phase as you would see it from your location, with the shadow falling where it really does, the maria shaded, and a halo around it. Scroll to move through time. linecast moon --oneline fits a status bar.

Point sunshine or moon somewhere across an ocean and the rise and set times come back in that place's local clock.

Tides

The tide chart runs across several days and marks the highs, the lows, and the current predicted water level. Scroll to move through time.

Predictions come from the national services where they exist — NOAA in the US, the Canadian Hydrographic Service, Queensland Open Data, and the Hong Kong Observatory — and from Open-Meteo's global tide model everywhere else. An optional TideCheck key adds more named stations. linecast tides --nearby lists the closest stations; linecast tides --station <id or name> pins one.

Radar

Radar animates recent observations and an hour of forecast over a braille basemap.

Real radar exists only where open composites are published: North America, Europe, and parts of East and Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, LibreWXR fills in with a precipitation model, and it looks like one. US warning polygons are drawn too, along with optional temperature and wind layers and hourly infrared satellite imagery.

Rain is drawn in colors taken from your terminal theme; if the theme is monochrome, so is the rain. There are a few fixed themes as well — dusk, ember, ink, and marangai — plus LibreWXR's server-rendered ones. Press t to switch.

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

--source librewxr, --source rainviewer, or --source iem pins one frame source instead of routing by location, for comparing what each shows over the same spot.

Maps

Maps draws the streets in braille over water, land, parks, and buildings filled in solid color.

In terrain view, the land is shaded by height and lit from one side, like a relief map. Coastlines, borders, water, and cities are drawn over it in braille; l toggles them and the labels.

Search with / and ask for directions with d. Directions open as a panel of turn-by-turn steps; arrow or click through them and the map flies along the route.

Zoom all the way out and either view becomes a 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 or exact lat,lng coordinates. A name is looked up once, on the spot, and the first match is saved; search lists the candidates when the first match might not be the right one. A command's --location flag or WEATHER_LOCATION wins over the saved location.

With no location saved or passed, linecast falls back to IP geolocation: a single anonymous request to ipinfo.io (or to ipwho.is or GeoJS if it doesn't answer), 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. Save a location, or set any override, and the request is not made at all.

Units

Units follow the location: imperial in the United States, metric everywhere else. 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 tries to follow 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 pick the language. There are seventeen:

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

In India, alerts go one step further: SACHET publishes many of them in the state language, and --lang hi, te, or, mr, or another Indian language code shows that regional text where it exists, while the rest of the app stays in English.

Color and icons

linecast asks the terminal for its palette so its colors belong in your theme. Set LINECAST_COLOR to truecolor, 256, 16, or none to choose the color mode yourself, or use the standard NO_COLOR variable.

Icons come in three sets: Nerd Font glyphs in terminals that bundle them (WezTerm, kitty, Ghostty), emoji in other terminals, and plain Unicode when output is piped. If you have installed a Nerd Font in Alacritty, foot, or iTerm2, linecast cannot tell, so 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.

Short names

If you'd rather type weather than linecast weather, 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. A shell alias does the same job.

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 linked 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 a 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.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. ARCHITECTURE.md is the map of the code. The suite runs with uv run --with pytest pytest tests -q and the lint with uvx ruff check src tests scripts; both are meant to run without the network and without touching your home directory.

Lineage

Prior art.

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

License

MIT