I Turned Wikipedia Into a CLI Tool

MeloAlright — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:47:56 +0000

I didn’t start this project because I wanted to build a CLI.

I started it because I got annoyed.

The Moment That Triggered It

I use Wikipedia a lot.

Not in a “casual browsing” way — more like:

quick fact checks
jumping between related topics
reading just enough to understand something

But every time I opened it, I felt friction.

Too much UI.

Too many distractions.

Too slow to navigate.

I didn’t want a website.

I wanted something closer to a tool.

Something like:

“Give me the essence of this topic. Fast.”

Why a CLI?

Because the terminal has a very different philosophy:

no noise
no layout shifts
no ads
no infinite scroll
just input → output

A CLI forces you to think:

What is the minimal interface for knowledge retrieval?

That question became the core of this project.

The Idea

Instead of browsing Wikipedia…

What if I could do:

wiki quantum computing

And instantly get:

a clean summary
structured sections
links I can jump into

No tabs.
No mouse.
No context switching.

If You’re Interested

I’d love feedback, ideas, or criticism.
repo: rscli/wikipedia-cli

ColorID: 🌈 The unique 4-colors-ID string generator in JavaScript

MeloAlright — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 14:44:42 +0000

Color as Identify - The unique 4-colors-ID string generator in JavaScript

The performance of ColorID is better than UUID and NanoID (The algorithm of ColorID is actually very similar to the UUID.V4)

If we use ColorID to represent identities in social networks, we can easily generate personalized social information for users, such as avatars, NFTs, etc.

The ColorID is consisted by 4 colors in the RGB channel from 12 unsigned 8 bits numbers (u8), so the theoretical total of ColorID is (2^8)^12 = 2^96 ≈ 7*10^28, which means that even if the ColorID is generated for every 7.8 billion people in the world every second, it will take 300 billion years to use up all ColorIDs. And ColorID provides safety by using hardware random generator, can also be used in clusters.

Because the Four color theorem, if we need to color the regions of any avatars or NFTs so that no two adjacent regions have the same color, four colors are enough!

Install

$ npm i colorid.js

Usage

import colorid from "colorid.js";

colorid(); // #5B34F9-#34F9DF-#F9DF4E-#DF4EB5

#5B34F9-#34F9DF-#F9DF4E-#DF4EB5

Performance

crypto.randomUUID    8,829,532 ops/sec
colorid              3,252,649 ops/sec
nanoid               2,925,204 ops/sec
uuid v4                910,855 ops/sec

Benchmark configuration: Ubuntu, Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8171M CPU @ 2.60GHz, Node.js 18.9.0

(runs: 3045998209)

License

MIT

ColorID in Other Languages

Rust

DEV Community: MeloAlright