ansiweather: One-line weather report, with frills

If it seems like most of the titles thus far are in the early part of the alphabet, that is only to be expected. There hasn’t been much of a chance to pull in titles from the latter half, after scraping through everything after about section N onward.

So just by virtue of time and random chance, a lot of what I have is in the A through M portion. I hope that doesn’t disappoint. 😉

Here’s ansiweather, which might seem a bit minimalistic at first.

Mmm, color. 😀 Let’s get a close-up, and give ansiweather a chance to shine.

Whoa! Okay! That’s too close. But I think you can see one of ansiweather’s high points there: the use of specific weather ideographs as embellishments.

ansiweather also allows for forecast data, specific date formats, and of course, specific locations. All condensed into a single-line display.

Pretty cool. Colorful, terse, customizable, lightweight. I can find nothing wrong. Except of course, that those little umbrellas and clouds probably won’t show up in a virtual console. That’s a mighty small complaint though.

At this point, ansiweather is probably either a stroke of genius to you, or something so completely understated as to be rubbish. But consider adding ansiweather to …

• vtclock, which allows you to pipe in the results of a command. Now you have a weather clock for your desktop;
• Your .bashrc / .bash_profile, or maybe even somehow part of /etc/issue, which would give every console a weather report at login. This one might take a little effort to produce.
• ticker or ticker, either of which will scroll that information across your console, vertically or horizontally;
• figlet, or for real craziness, toilet … say no more;
• or even just watch, which will allow you to paint it into a corner and update at set intervals. If you use a graphical desktop, try a terminal emulator set to be completely transparent, forced to the root desktop, reshaped to only one or two lines, and updating ansiweather at intervals. It’s like conky, without conky. 😉

You might also consider cramming this into a terminal multiplexer, either as a specific panel or “desktop widget,” or through some sort of built-in status bar. Let me know if you figure that one out.

At first ansiweather might seem like a triviality, but like a lot of things with Linux, it’s not the tool that matters. It’s how you use it. 😉