weather, weathercli and weatherman: Whither the weather?

I can never be sure, but it seems all the fun text-based weather applications have already been accounted for. 😦

There was cursetheweather, which did a great job breaking out the forecast in a professional manner. And there was weatherspect, which did the same thing but went in totally the opposite direction, making the forecast much more amusing.

What’s left appears to be in a rather scattered state. First, here’s the aptly named weather.

As you can see, weather does a decent job of drawing forecast information from the web, and displaying it in an attractive table. No color, but we can’t have everything, can we?

There’s more to weather than just the -i flag, but I didn’t take the time to go through the entire configuration. What I’ve seen in other screenshots suggests it doesn’t look too much different from the -i version, it just saves you retyping that each time. 😉

weather is in Arch as just “weather,” but it appears in Debian as “weather-util,” which leads to some confusion. There is also a “weather-util” in AUR, and it draws from the same package as “weather.” But at the time of this writing, “weather-util” in AUR was unable to actually retrieve meteorological data.

weathercli is another tool that’s in AUR, but not in Debian. weathercli may also not be 100 percent working any more. Best I could tell from the mangled output, this pulls weather from weatherbug.com, and attempts to reformat it into a table similar to weather’s output.

I say “attempts,” because all I got was random HTML spattered over the screen, and an empty output form at the end. I tried to pump that into a text file and open it in a browser, but it wasn’t much to look at.

I see timestamps on weathercli that reach back to 2009, so I expect it has simply fallen out of use, and can’t parse weatherbug.com’s output any longer.

weatherman is probably the program weathercli wanted to be — a text-based interface to weatherbug.com.

This is also in AUR, but not in Debian. I like weatherman best, out of this small set, just for the extended forecast option. It does a good job parsing locations outside U.S. zip codes, and it knows enough to use Celsius or Fahrenheit, depending on the location.

But sometimes I just want a five-day breakdown of what to expect, and weatherman is the one that appears to do that in the most approachable format.

Of these three (four?), weatherman is the one that appears to be best-attended too. The github page shows updates within the last couple of months, and that’s always a good thing. Especially when some of these have obviously fallen by the wayside.

For straightforward weather data, any of these is a good tool. For something a little more professional and colorful, cursetheweather is my suggestion. And for something really fruity and entertaining, you’ll have to drop back to weatherspect.

Or you could just install them all. Why not? What’s holding you back? 😉