HomeAboutBlogTutorialWikit – A Command Line Tool to Search Wikipedia in Linux

Wikit – A Command Line Tool to Search Wikipedia in Linux

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Wikit is a free and open source command line program for easily viewing Wikipedia summaries of search queries; it is built using Nodejs. The verb Wikit (derived from “wikipedia it“) means looking up something on wikipedia.org, the popular and remarkable open source encyclopedia on the Internet.

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Read Also: Googler: A Command Line Tool to Do ‘Google Search’ from Linux Terminal

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To install Wikit on Linux systems, you must have nodejs and npm installed, if not install it using your default package manager as shown.

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$ sudo apt install nodejst#Debian/Ubunturn$ sudo yum install nodejs npmt#RHEL/CentOSrn$ sudo dnf install nodejs npmt#Fedora 22+

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Installing nodejs and npm from the default repositories, will give you the little older version. Therefore, read our article to get more recent version of nodejs and npm in Linux.

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After installing the necessary dependencies, run the following command to install wikit in Linux (the -g flag tells npm to install wikit globally).

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$ sudo npm install wikit -grn

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Once Wikit installed on your system, you can run it using following syntax.

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$ wikit Linuxrn

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Wikipedia Command Line View
Wikipedia Command Line View

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The output shown is the paragraphs of the wikipedia article before the table of contents and the line length is neatly wrapped based on your terminal’s window size, with a max of about 80 characters.

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If you are running wikit on a desktop computer with a web browser installed, you can open the full Wikipedia article in a browser using the -b flag as below.

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$ wikit linux -brn

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To define the line wrap length to number (minimum 15), use the -l option as shown.

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$ wikit linux -l 90rn

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For more information, go to the Wikit Github repository.

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Lastly, do check out these fancy command line based tools for various tasks.

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  1. 5 Linux Command Line Based Tools for Downloading Files and Browsing Websites

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  2. Install YouTube-DL – A Command Line Video Download Tool for Linux

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  3. 8 Command Line Tools for Browsing Websites and Downloading Files in Linux

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  4. Trash-cli – A Trashcan Tool to Manage ‘Trash’ from Linux Command Line

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  5. Fasd – A Commandline Tool That Offers Quick Access to Files and Directories

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  6. Inxi – A Powerful Feature-Rich Commandline System Information Tool for Linux

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You can use the comment form below to ask any questions or share any useful thoughts with us.

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