Much like I'm a medievalist who feels closer to this tradition's forebears by hand-drawing birth charts, I interact with my computer through a Linux shell. Astrology through these means has been possible for longer than I've been alive thanks to Astrolog, a free and open-source astrology program continuously developed by Walter Pullen since 1991 for Windows, macOS, Unix, and once upon a time, MS-DOS and the Amiga! (80s and 90s computers, the earliest consumer PCs.) It's about as fully featured as SolarFire, but can be intimidating or unsexy to users who expect such 21st century excesses as anti-aliasing or cursors or more than 24 colors, and I promise you my Pluto is in Sagittarius.

I thought I'd share my Astrolog 7.80 config in a gist, which works for me on four Linux hosts: an Arch Linux laptop, a Debian 13 desktop, an Ubuntu VPS, and Termux. Nothing I'm saying here isn't clearly stated in the documentation or astrolog -H, but what follows are the steps I took to customize this program to largely medieval techniques.

Contents

1. What's a CLI?
2. Installation
3. Configuration
4. Getting started
5. Why?
6. New Moon in Cancer