Brolly Serves the Weather as Pure Plain Text — No JS, No Clutter

Brolly is a minimalist weather service that renders forecasts entirely in plain text, trading the usual dashboard of animated icons and interactive maps for something that reads like terminal output. A single page packs a surprising amount of data: current conditions, a week-ahead table, hour-by-hour temperature and wind, and ASCII bar charts for precipitation probability, UV index, air quality, and pollen counts. The sample forecast for York, England shows the format in action — overcast skies, a precipitation peak of 0.4mm around 03:00, and moderate UV peaking mid-afternoon, all drawn with hash marks and dashes.

The appeal is squarely aesthetic and practical rather than technical novelty. A text-only forecast loads instantly, works over slow connections, degrades gracefully, and sidesteps the tracking scripts and ad-heavy layouts that bloat mainstream weather sites. It fits neatly into the small-web and terminal-first sensibility that recurs on Hacker News, where users reward tools that do one thing legibly and get out of the way.

As a Show HN submission, Brolly is less a product than a design statement about how much signal you can deliver without a single pixel of chrome. Whether it gains traction depends on the usual questions for such projects — data source reliability, location coverage, and whether the maintainer keeps it running — but the core idea lands: sometimes the most usable interface is the one with no interface at all.