r/xkcd • u/positivemark • 5d ago

XKCD XKCD PowerShell module

Years ago just for fun, I wrote a PowerShell module to query the XKCD API. It has a `Get-XKCD` cmdlet to retrieve data about a specified or random comic, and had a `-Open` switch to then open its URL in a browser. You can also use `Find-XKCD` to perform keyword searches, and there's a local cache of the API output to speed this up and to reduce the need to do web calls.

Modern terminals now support the ability to render images directly, so I've just added `Show-XKCD` and `Get-XKCD -Show`:

This works in Windows Terminal, but should also work in iTerm2 and Kitty.

If it's of interest, you can download the module from the PowerShell Gallery here: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/XKCD/1.5.0

Or directly from GitHub: https://github.com/markwragg/Powershell-XKCD

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u/positivemark 4d ago

I couldn’t stop tinkering with this (thanks to Claude) and so there’s some new features today. You can now pull the Explanation for a comic from the explain XKCD wiki via Get-XKCDExplanation and Show-XKCDExplanation. You can use Test-XKCD to see if there’s a newer comic than the latest last one you read (I’m going to add this to my profile.ps1) and Set-XKCDDefault to save some default values for the other cmdlets, such as if you always want the high quality image versions.

Download version 1.6.1 or later for these features.