Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

I love plain text services. One of their benefits is near instant load time. A nitpick, but this takes a few seconds to load on a fast broadband connection for me. I get the delay even refreshing the same page, where I'd expect the cache to be hit.

Love it. This reminds me of wttr.in, but with the benefit of interactivity and that it works much better on mobile. I also happen to often use terminals in a narrower aspect, so wttr.in doesn't work perfectly for me. It'd be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!

  w3m -4 -dump https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8

  finger weather:85534@bbs.airandwave.net

Thoughts about serving pure text (not HTML) so that someone can pull this using a curl command, awk the output and do various things with it? Wish more sites did that.

I was thoroughly confused at why the website was showing the weather for York. Since I studied there (and it's straight up a lovely place), I visit quite often and subsequently check the weather. I thought I had set it but couldn't remember doing so. As someone else said, this being text-based makes it particularly digestible to LLMs. Out of curiosity, I looked up weather MCPs and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/weather-mcp/weather-mcp

Seeing a text-based weather report takes me back about 34 years! In 1992, I was finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. During breaks from dissertation writing, I spent a fair amount of time on the lab computer. One project that I undertook for fun was writing a Bourne shell script to access data from Weather Underground. While this project never led to 15 minutes (or even nanoseconds) of fame, the shell script did get used by a number of other sites.

It's great to see that there's still a use for plain-text weather!

Seems like a good use case for Unicode weather symbols.

Looks great! One suggestion, please consider adding a dark mode option for those users with visual impairment. The current light mode is too bright for some users. The dark mode on your site would compete with https://wttr.in which is dark.

Very interesting. The past few days' trend is so common in small talk and general weather discourse ("it was warmer last week") but underrated in weather apps. It's helpful that Open-Meteo provides that data

This output is incidentally perfectly context engineered for LLMs too; I pasted the Delhi page contents into Arena .ai and asked "what's the gist" and qwen3.6-plus said (among other things) " A hot, humid day with a slight chance of afternoon showers." and gemini-3.1-pro-preview said "Mostly clear, but hot and very humid. While the actual high is 34°C, it will feel like 42°C in the afternoon."

How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.

Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.

So glad that you've made this. The metoffice redesign is crap.

Seems that sunrise/sunset are missing

My only comment is that the time of the report under the date was a little confusing, for a moment I thought that was the current time. Maybe you could add `as at` so it differentiates the time of the observation window versus the current time?

I'll try using this as my go to over the next week :) thank you for making this.

I love the graphs, it's a very neat approach!

I also greatly appreciate getting to see the past few days' history for my location - too many weather sites are only really forward-looking, and I sometimes want to compare to a prior day when the current day feels different somehow.

Congrats!

Very small suggestion: it’d be cool if you used a service to geoip the incoming ip address - there’s also https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/ that will inject the lat lng directly into the request header to your server

It’d just help set a good enough starting location.

Cheers!

Is there a reason why the URL parameters are obfuscated? I think it would more user (and SEO) friendly to have at least the place names in the URL, e.g. brolly.sh/forecast/united-kingdom/yorkshire/york.

Still, great project! Definitely fulfils my desire for minimalism in all things.

This is cool and I appreciate how compact it is. I'd love to have this as a regular load on my desktop. My only note would be that the precipitation graph feels unnecessarily bulky - wouldn't it work with the same type of horizontal graph seen for the ones below it? I know precipitation demands somewhat more precision and immediacy, but you could also do a variable graph - left half next hour, right half next 12 hours or something.

Would be nice if desktop rendered in columns. Would be nice if it were curl-able (like not serving raw html to curl). Would be nice if URL pattern was like wttr.in (NYC for example is https://brolly.sh/forecast/YcUDdBLc <---which means nothing to me, vs wttr.in/nyc <---which is plainly obvious)

Cool, though for at a glance weather, personally I like images like the bbc one https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2633352

One small tweak would be descriptive urls

London UK is currently 'forecast/zRKY7wMc' you could label all population centres >100k like 'forecast/uk-london', 'forecast/cn-london', etc

FWIW, I vibe-coded https://meteo.karteum.ovh/ a few months ago for my own use-case (it interfaces with open-meteo.com. Click in the map to add points, and click in the point to get details)

Very cool. I would consider changing Celsius to Fahrenheit for US based locations (or just make it as an additional option for settings).

This is actually a great format for LLM consumption too.

Structured, concise weather information without unnecessary UI noise is much easier for agents to parse and summarize.

A JSON endpoint or an MCP server on top of this would be an interesting extension.

Oh god I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the new Met Office website/app, but their forecasts and radar maps are the best. Where do you get the data from?

ICAO slugs for quick lookup would be awesome. e.g. brolly.sh/kjfk

As other users pointed out, it'd be great if this could be curl'd like with wttr.in

Searching for and clicking on Sheringham gives a 400 error.

It's already saved to home screen. Love the simple text interface.

This is really pleasing to use, lovely work :)

Also, wanted to note I appreciate your stance on AI:

> I manually designed the site, defined its architecture, structure etc.

> I have however used AI to implement significant portions, whilst keeping the most interesting bits to work on myself.

> I have mixed feelings about AI. I wouldn't have had the time to build this site without it, and use it heavily in my day job to improve velocity. But, there are also points where I deliberately avoid using it, either to keep the joy of focusing on a problem, or to make sure I'm not accidentally AI 'doom scrolling' my way through life. Everything is a balance.

I don't see a way to change from F to C...?

would be great to show humidity %

Cool. There's unicode cloud characters. Would be nice to have a visual indication of rain/sun/cloudy etc

Really love this website and its awesome, thanks for making this!

I really love Golang minimalist applications using sqlite. The whole architecture feels really elegant to me personally. I wish you luck for this project and if I may ask, is the project open source, I really love its UI :) ,it feels so cool!

DIG IT. This is how the web used to feel.

It gets my location totally wrong

This is really cool, and I love the name

Thank you so much for this. It's fantastic.

Can we have METARs for airport codes in this exact aesthetic?

thank you for bringing another TUI into the world!

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Very cool, and bookmarked. And spot on for the HN crowd, I think. I went in a very different direction with lot’s of visuals. Might not be to everyone’s liking but check it out if you want https://tshirtweather.fyi

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