Wikit – Search Wikipedia on Linux Command Line
Wikit is a free and open-source command-line program for easily viewing Wikipedia summaries of search queries on the Linux command line; 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.
To install Wikit on Linux systems, you must have nodejs and npm installed, if not install it using your default package manager as shown.
$ sudo apt install nodejs #Debian/Ubuntu $ sudo yum install nodejs npm #RHEL/CentOS $ sudo dnf install nodejs npm #Fedora 22+
Installing nodejs and npm from the default repositories will give you the little older version. Therefore, read our article to get a more recent version of nodejs and npm in Linux.
After installing the necessary dependencies, run the following command to install wikit in Linux (the -g
flag tells npm to install wikit globally).
$ sudo npm install wikit -g
Once Wikit is installed on your system, you can run it using the following syntax.
$ wikit Linux
![Wikipedia Command Line View](https://webomate.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/wikit-search-wikipedia-on-linux-command-line.png)
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.
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.
$ wikit linux -b
To define the line wrap length to number (minimum 15), use the -l
option as shown.
$ wikit linux --line 90
![Searching Wikipedia on Linux Commandline](https://webomate.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/wikit-search-wikipedia-on-linux-command-line-1.png)
For more information, go to the Wikit Github repository.
Lastly, do check out these fancy command line-based tools for various tasks.
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