xkcd-term

A super minimalistic xkcd viewer for the terminal with support for different output formats.

I wrote this primarily to display the newest xkcds in my motd.

Usage

$ xkcd -help
Usage of xkcd:
  -f string
    	controls the atom feed URL in case it changes in the future (default "https://www.xkcd.com/atom.xml")
  -i int
    	(Optional) Selects the newest comic to output by ID. If it is 0, the atom feed is used to get the newest post.
  -n int
    	maximum number of xkcds to output. (default 1)
  -o string
    	controls the output format. Choose: 'human', 'json', 'yaml', 'xml', 'select' (default "human")
  -s string
    	selects value to output. For use only with 'select' output format. Choose: 'Title', 'URL', 'ImageURL', 'Caption' (default "ImageURL")
  -t uint
    	(Optional) Number of hours after which the feed cache is marked as stale. To improve performance, the feed is only fetched every few hours. Setting -t to 0 disables the cache. This option only applies when fetching the latest comics, i.e. when -i is 0. Also, when fetching more than about 4 comics using -n, they might not all be in the cache in which case they're fetched without the cache. (default 8)

Examples

Open the latest xkcd in your default browser

xdg-open $( xkcd -o select -s URL )

View the last 5 xkcds with feh

xkcd -n 5 -o select -s ImageURL | xargs -n 1 feh

View xkcd number 2000

xkcd -i 2000

View xkcds 190 - 200:

xkcd -i 200 -n 11

Display the latest xkcd caption and URL with cowsay

#!/bin/bash
xkcd_latest=$( xkcd -o json )

echo "$xkcd_latest" | jq -r '.[].Caption' | xargs cowsay -f three-eyes
echo "$xkcd_latest" | jq -r '.[].ImageURL'

Install

Get your hot, fresh, and glitter-filled pre-built binaries for GNU/Linux, or build from source. Go v1.14 is recommended for building.

git clone https://github.com/strangedev/xkcd-term.git
cd xkcd-term
make
sudo make install

On Linux, you can use the install-bin.sh bash script to download and verify releases:

./install-bin.sh v2.1.0