How to Install and Use tenki in Linux for an Animated Terminal Weather Forecast

Checking local weather conditions, hourly rain projections, wind directions, and multi-day meteorological forecasts from the Linux desktop often tempts users to open resource-heavy web browsers or install background desktop widgets. For terminal enthusiasts, system administrators, and minimalist developers, staying inside the command line is vastly more efficient. While simple curl scripts like curl wttr.in provide static text reports, modern terminal capabilities allow for far richer graphical experiences. Enter tenki: an interactive, beautifully animated terminal weather viewer written in Rust.

Featuring realistic ASCII and ANSI animations of rainfall, snowflakes, thunderclouds, drifting mist, and shimmering sunlight, tenki delivers real-time meteorological conditions and week-long forecasts rendered directly inside your shell. In this guide, you will learn how to install tenki on Linux, configure location coordinates and Open-Meteo weather backends, customize animation speeds, and integrate weather reports into your daily command-line routine.

What Is tenki and Why Use It in the Terminal?

tenki (Japanese for “weather”) transforms raw meteorological telemetry into a kinetic visual presentation:

• Animated Weather Effects: Dynamically simulates wind-blown rain, drifting blizzards, rolling fog, lightning storms, and clear celestial night skies in real time.
• Open-Meteo Integration: Fetches high-accuracy atmospheric telemetry from Open-Meteo without requiring proprietary API registration keys or credit cards.
• Granular Telemetry Panels: Displays ambient temperature, feels-like temperature, humidity percentage, atmospheric pressure, wind velocity, and UV index.
• Hourly and Multi-Day Forecasts: Provides intuitive horizontal temperature graphs and condition timelines spanning the next 24 hours and 7 days.
• Minimal System Footprint: Compiled as a native static Rust binary with negligible memory overhead and zero runtime dependencies.

Step 1: Installing tenki on Linux

You can install tenki on modern Linux distributions via Cargo, pre-built binary archives, or the Arch User Repository (AUR).

Method 1: Installing via Cargo (Recommended for Any Distribution)

If you have the Rust development environment installed, compile and install tenki directly from crates.io:

cargo install tenki

Ensure your local Cargo binary path (~/.cargo/bin) is exported in your shell profile (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc).

Method 2: Installing Pre-Compiled Binaries

Download the pre-compiled Linux binary directly from the official GitHub release repository:

# Fetch the latest release tarball
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/ckaznable/tenki/releases/latest \
  | grep "browser_download_url.*linux.*tar.gz" \
  | cut -d : -f 2,3 \
  | tr -d \" \
  | wget -qi -

# Extract archive
tar -xzf tenki-*.tar.gz

# Move binary to executable path
sudo mv tenki /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tenki

Method 3: Installing on Arch Linux

Arch Linux and Manjaro users can install tenki via an AUR helper like paru or yay:

yay -S tenki-bin

Verify installation by querying the version string:

tenki --version

Step 2: Launching tenki and Viewing Your Local Forecast

By default, launching tenki without arguments uses geo-IP lookup to automatically identify your approximate geographical coordinates and display local weather conditions:

tenki

The terminal clears to present a rich, animated weather canvas:

• The upper-left panel displays the active animated scene (e.g. falling raindrops or swirling cloud formations) alongside large current temperature readouts.
• The upper-right panel presents secondary metrics: Humidity, Wind Speed & Direction, Pressure, and Visibility.
• The lower panel plots hourly forecast progressions with interactive temperature curves.

Step 3: Querying Specific Cities and Coordinates

You can query international cities or precise latitude/longitude locations anywhere in the world:

Specifying Cities by Name

# Query London weather
tenki -c London

# Query Tokyo weather
tenki -c Tokyo

# Query New York weather
tenki -c "New York"

Using Exact Geographical Coordinates

For rural stations, remote weather outposts, or precise maritime coordinates:

tenki --lat 51.5074 --lon -0.1278

Step 4: Customising Animation Speed and Display Units

Fine-tune visual rendering and temperature scales using command-line flags:

Switching Temperature Units

Toggle between Celsius and Fahrenheit scales:

# Force Fahrenheit
tenki -u fahrenheit

# Force Celsius
tenki -u celsius

Adjusting Wind and Animation Speed

If you prefer a calmer or faster animation pace inside your terminal background:

# Slow down animation rendering
tenki --fps 15

# Disable animations for static terminal snapshots or scripts
tenki --static

Step 5: Setting Up Default Preferences in a Configuration File

To preserve your favorite city and units across reboots, create a dedicated configuration file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/tenki
nano ~/.config/tenki/config.toml

Define your default city, units, and animation parameters:

city = "Edinburgh"
units = "celsius"
fps = 30
static = false

Save the file. Subsequent executions of tenki will launch your customized hometown forecast instantly without passing flags.