wiki

Wiki is a command line tool to fetch summaries from any Mediawiki wiki. By default, it searches the English language version of Wikipedia.

To use wiki, you’ll need a working golang install.

You can install wiki with go get, which will download and compile the go code.

bash
go get github.com/walle/wiki/cmd/wiki

Once we have it installed, we can take a look at the help page for the tool. There’s lots of options available, allowing you to change language, show short summaries only and ignore HTTPS verification.

bash
wiki --help
wiki is a tool used to fetch excerpts from wikipedia
Usage: wiki [options...] query
Options:
    -h=false: Print help information and exit.
    -l="en": The language to use
    -n=false: If the output should not be colorized
    -no-check-certificate=false: Skip verification of certificates
    -s=false: If simple output should be used
    -short=false: If short output should be used
    -u="https://%s.wikipedia.org/w/api.php": The api url
    -version=false: Print version information and exit.

Personally, I like to use it with the short flag to get a brief description of what I’m looking for:

bash
$ wiki -short unix
Unix (all-caps UNIX for the trademark) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer
operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, developed in the 1970s at
the Bell Labs research centre by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

wiki is a very specific tool, but it’s one that will come in very useful when I want to look something up but don’t want to fall into the trap of reading Wikipedia for hours.