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v0.2.0

A readable list view becomes the default on a terminal, output is colored, and slow reads get a progress spinner.

This release is about what a command looks like while you wait for it and after it lands. The terminal default changes from a table to a readable list, the output is colored, and a slow read no longer sits blank.

The list view is the new default on a terminal

With no -o, wiki now prints each record as a short section instead of a row in a grid:

Pi
  pageid        23601
  length        151325
  touched       2026-06-12T17:04:39Z
  contentmodel  wikitext
  language      en
  url           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

A heading, then the fields below it. This reads better than a wide table when a record carries a lot of fields, like page info, a revision, or a media file, where the grid pushes columns off the edge of the screen. On a terminal the sections are colored; pipe the output or pass --color=never and they come out as literal GitHub-flavored markdown you can paste straight into an issue.

The table is not gone. It is one flag away:

wiki search "physics" -o table

Reach for it when you want to scan one column down many rows. There is also a new -o markdown for a GitHub-flavored pipe table. And nothing about pipes changes: with no -o, piped output is still jsonl, so every script and jq pipeline keeps working exactly as before.

Color

The output now uses color on a terminal: a bold heading and aligned keys in list, a bold header and dimmed borders in table, and syntax-highlighted json and jsonl. It is on for an interactive terminal and off when piped, so machine-read output stays plain. --color (auto|always|never) overrides it, and the NO_COLOR convention is honored.

A progress spinner for slow reads

A read often waits on the network before it has a single result to show. When the terminal is interactive, wiki now prints a small spinner while it waits and clears it the moment the first result is ready.

The spinner only ever writes to standard error, so a pipe like wiki search physics | jq and a redirect like wiki search physics > out.jsonl never see it; the data on standard output stays clean. --quiet turns it off.

Upgrade

go install github.com/tamnd/wikipedia-cli/cmd/wiki@latest

Prebuilt archives for Linux, macOS, and Windows on amd64 and arm64, plus deb, rpm, and apk packages, a container image, and checksums, are on the release page. The binary is pure Go, builds with CGO_ENABLED=0, and has no runtime dependencies. The only behavior change is the terminal default format; piped output is unchanged.

3 min read