u/DriftVora

i hacked together a little bash script that scrapes google and lets you ask almost any question straight from your terminal. it hits multiple spots on the results page and the answers are surprisingly accurate and consistent.

repo: https://github.com/Bugswriter/tuxi

video overview: https://youtu.be/EtwWvMa8muU?t=9

how it works (short demo here: https://youtu.be/EtwWvMa8muU?t=23)

usage: `tuxi <almost any question>` (quotes are optional)

$ tuxi linus torvalds birthday

28 December 1969

$ tuxi fastest animal in the world

peregrine falcon

$ tuxi Does Choclate increase fat

&gt; u mean Chocolate?

Also, chocolate is high in sugar and saturated fat. It is a high-energy (high calorie) food, and too much can result in excess weight, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

$ tuxi "what is unix?"

Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

$ tuxi best games of 2009

* Batman: Arkham Asylum

* Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

* Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

* Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

some neat bits

if you typo something, it will gently correct you before answering

&gt; u mean <corrected text>

if you ask for something list-like, for example "the social network cast", it returns a clean list

* Jesse Eisenberg

* Andrew Garfield

* Justin Timberlake

* Armie Hammer

* Aaron Sorkin

<usually longer than this>

for questions that can be answered with a single word, like "who was the first lady programmer?" it tries to give just that one word, using a priority system while scraping

you can also hook it into espeak and dmenu

turn the response into speech:

$ tuxi "$(echo "" | dmenu -p "ask tuxi")" | espeak -s 150

tested it all day and it’s been very solid so far. super handy if you want to google stuff without touching a browser or GUI at all, and it plays nice with scripts. also kind of fun for kids to mess around with.

not claiming it’s a siri or alexa replacement, but for a simple terminal tool it feels pretty magical to use.