Tuxi: A Command Line Virtual Assistant

Everybody uses ( or used at least once ) digital assistants. Or voice assistants. Or virtual assistants. Whatever you want to call them.

We all know about Siri, Alexa, OK Google and so on. There’s even people that use open-source virtual assistants like Mycroft.

We also know how creepy these virtual assistants are. Some less creepy than others, depends on who owns them, but they’re all creepy.

Searching for answers to your questions on Google, despite their excellent algorithm, is still creepy. Luckily there’s a middle ground, and it comes in form of a simple bash script called tuxi.

The script allows you to search Google, from the command line, by simply typing tuxifollowed by your search query. If the query returns several results, Tuxi will choose the most relevant result on the basis of priority.

The script uses:

• pup ( dependency ) to scrape Google search results and SERPs
• jq  ( dependency ), awk and sed to process and return results
• recode ( dependency ) to unescape html

 

INSTALL TUXI

If you’re running Arch Linux ( or a distro based on Arch ), you can find tuxi in the AUR. If you’re running any other distro you can install tuxi with curl or  make

 

Install tuxi using curl:

• sudo curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bugswriter/tuxi/main/tuxi" -o /usr/local/bin/tuxi
• sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/tuxi

To update you’ll only need to use the curl command. There’s no need to chmod again.

To uninstall, simply remove tuxi from your $PATH, for example sudo rm -f /usr/local/bin/tuxi.

 

 

Install tuxi using make:

• git clone https://github.com/Bugswriter/tuxi.git && cd tuxi
• sudo make install

To update, just git pull on your local tuxi repository and reinstall with sudo make install.

To uninstall, all you have to do is run sudo make uninstall

 

USING TUXI

 

As mentioned before, using tuxi is just a matter of running tuxifollowed by your search query. For example: tuxi cast of wandavision or tuxi barcelona weather or tuxi 1 EURO in USD or tuxi i love you in spanish. Whatever you want to search for. It also works with lyrics, dates, math etc.

If you want to use special charaters ((?=!|&<>%$#/\))  in your search query, then you will need to add quotes to your search query. For example tuxi "428*123"

Tuxi is smart enough to know if you mispelled something in your search query.

 

Tuxi, by default, will use the system language. However, if you want to change the language of your queries, you can do that by editing the script.

 

To learn more about how tuxi works, check out the video below and also check out Tuxi’s project page on GitHub.

The video blow is a YouTube nocookie embed. If you wish to watch the video in invidious, follow this link.