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

Install · Using it · A closer look · Settings · Contributing

Install

brew install linecast

Or with uv:

uv tool install linecast

pipx install linecast and pip install linecast work too, and there are community packages in the AUR and in nixpkgs (unstable channel, for now). linecast needs Python 3.10 or newer.

To try it without 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

Run in a terminal, every command opens live, at the place your IP address suggests until you save 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 --oneline for a status bar.

A closer look

Weather

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 uses the CPCB's National AQI scale. If the forecast service cannot be reached, the last forecast stands in, and a line under the header says which day it is from; r asks for a newer one.

Sunshine

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

--year draws the whole year. Each column is a day, midnight to midnight, colored by the sky at each hour, so sunrise and sunset appear where night meets day. Hover a day for its sunrise, sunset, and day length. In live mode v switches between the day and the year, and --dst keeps each day on 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

moon draws the phase as you see it from where you are, with the shadow falling where it really does, the maria shaded, and a halo around it. Scroll to move through time. Point it somewhere across an ocean and the rise and set times come back in that place's local clock.

v flips to a calendar of the month (or open on it with --grid). Each day carries its phase as a small shaded disc, with today, the full and new moons, and the quarters marked. Scroll through the months, hover a day for its phase, moonrise, and moonset, and click one to open the disc view on it.

The moon can also follow a traditional calendar, with that calendar's date beside the phase and a countdown to its next festival or observance: the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean lunisolar calendars, the Thai lunar calendar, the Hawaiian Kaulana Mahina and the Samoan, Chamorro, and Refaluwasch calendars of the Pacific, the Islamic and Hebrew calendars, and the Old Farmer's Almanac. In Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai the calendar follows the language; any language can ask for any of them with --calendar. Each is computed on your device and checked against the published calendars. CALENDARS.md describes them one by one.

Tides

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

Predictions come from national services where they exist (NOAA, 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. --nearby lists the closest stations and --station <id or name> pins one.

Radar

Radar animates the 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, with optional temperature and wind layers and hourly infrared satellite imagery.

Rain takes its colors 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, rainviewer, or iem pins one frame source, for comparing what each shows over the same spot.

Maps

Streets are drawn in braille over water, land, parks, and buildings in solid color. In terrain view the land is shaded by height and lit from one side, like a relief map, with coastlines, borders, water, and cities in braille over it; 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. Drag to rotate it, or press r to set it spinning. s shades it into the daylight of this moment, with the terminator creeping and cities glowing on the night side, and c lays the current cloud cover over it from live satellite imagery. --view now opens straight to the full picture.

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

Settings

Settings live in ~/.config/linecast/config.json. A command-line flag beats an environment variable, which beats the saved setting. Each settings command below shows the current value when run with no argument, and auto returns it to the default.

Location

Save one location for every command:

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

set takes a place name or lat,lng. A name is looked up once and the first match saved; search lists the candidates when the first match might be wrong. --location or WEATHER_LOCATION wins over the saved location.

With no location saved or passed, linecast asks ipinfo.io (or ipwho.is or GeoJS if it doesn't answer) where your network connection is. That is usually the right city, sometimes the wrong one, and far off on a VPN or corporate network. The answer is cached for an hour. Save a location and the request is never made.

Units and clock

Units follow the location, imperial in the United States and metric everywhere else. The clock follows the country, 12-hour where people write 6:50 pm and 24-hour everywhere else. Pin either:

linecast units metric
linecast clock 24

Every view command takes --metric and --imperial for one run, and the ones that show times take --12h and --24h. weather adds --celsius and --fahrenheit for the temperature alone.

Language

--lang or LINECAST_LANG picks the language. There are eighteen:

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

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

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

Calendar

The moon's traditional calendar follows the language: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai get their own, and the rest get none. Pin any of them for every run, or none:

linecast calendar hebrew
linecast calendar none
linecast calendar auto

The names are chinese, japanese, korean, thai, hawaiian, samoan, chamorro, refaluwasch, islamic, hebrew, and almanac. moon --calendar takes one for a single run. CALENDARS.md describes each.

Color and icons

linecast asks the terminal for its palette so its colors belong in your theme. LINECAST_COLOR set to truecolor, 256, 16, or none chooses the color mode yourself, and the standard NO_COLOR is honored.

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

linecast icons nerd

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

Short names and shell completion

linecast link makes weather, sunshine, moon, tides, radar, and maps 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.

# 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 the short names too.

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, such as a provider that did not answer or 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