whirligig 0.4.0

Spin a colorful ASCII wheel of fortune in your terminal, from the CLI or Python

whirligig

Spin a colorful ASCII wheel of fortune in your terminal and let fate decide: what's for lunch, who reviews the PR, heads or tails.

Try it

No install needed if you have uv or pipx:

uvx whirligig Pizza Sushi Mexican Thai "Chicken Wings" Poke Burgers

Install

pip install whirligig

Requires Python 3.10+, on Linux, macOS, or Windows 10+.

CLI

Pass the choices as arguments; quote any that contain spaces.

whirligig Pizza Sushi Mexican Thai "Chicken Wings" Poke Burgers

Labels can repeat: each copy is its own slot on the wheel, so repeating a label is an easy way to weight the odds — whirligig Pizza Pizza Sushi lands on Pizza twice as often. All copies of the same label share one color, so they read as one choice spread across the wheel.

Known quirk: wide characters — emoji, CJK — occupy two terminal columns where the wheel's geometry counts one, so a 🍕 label can bend the circle slightly. The spin works fine; the wheel just loses a little roundness.

flag	default	meaning
-r, --radius	10	radius of the wheel, in characters (2–100)
-d, --delay	0.1	seconds each frame is held; lower spins faster
-f, --file	—	read labels from a file, one per line

whirligig -d 0.3 Yes No Maybe        # milk the suspense
whirligig -r 6 -d 0.02 heads tails   # just flip the coin already

A few wheels come ready-made — coin, dice, clock, and alphabet — and random spins one of them:

whirligig --preset dice
whirligig -p random          # surprise me

Keep a standing list in a file, one label per line, and spin it with -f. Blank lines are skipped:

whirligig -f lunch.txt

Piped input is read the same way, no flag needed (-f - also works):

grep -v alice teammates.txt | whirligig   # alice is on vacation
ls ~/Desktop | whirligig   # select a random file from your Desktop

Scripting

The wheel is drawn on your terminal, but stdout is just the choice — so you can watch the spin and capture the answer at the same time:

LUNCH=$(whirligig Pizza Sushi Mexican Thai "Chicken Wings" Poke Burgers)
echo "ordering $LUNCH"

The captured value is the bare label, with no color codes and no animation frames. With no terminal at all (in CI, or under whirligig ... &> file) the animation is skipped and only the choice is printed.

Python

whirligig.spin draws the same wheel:

import whirligig

result = whirligig.spin(["Pizza", "Sushi", "Mexican", "Thai", "Chicken Wings", "Poke", "Burgers"])

It returns the label the wheel landed on, and takes the CLI's knobs as keyword arguments: radius (default 10) is the wheel's size in characters, and delay (default 0.1) is the seconds each frame is held. The call blocks while the wheel animates; pass delay=0 to skip straight to the result:

result = whirligig.spin(["heads", "tails"], radius=6, delay=0)

Bad input raises ValueError: blank or multi-line labels, more labels than the radius can hold (the error suggests one that fits), or a terminal too small for the wheel. Full details live in help(whirligig.spin).

License

MIT