In this week’s Talk Show John Gruber describes the original IMDb interface as only available via email, where you entered the name of a film or actor in the subject and received a reply a few seconds later with the results. One of the other guests on the show has made browser extensions to clean up the IMDb site.

Searching around I found someone has already written a small Python script you can install and use to query IMDb from your command-line.

Which is great, but most people aren’t down with installing and using command line tools, so I thought I’d make my own web based command-line interface (CLI). After a couple of hours tinkering with the unofficial IMDb API and perfecting the look and feel of my replica CLI, I pushed it up to GitHub.

After some feedback on Twitter I added IMDb ratings to the results and with a bit more JavaScript tinkering I got ratings from Rotten Tomatoes as well, with the -t or --tomatoes option.

Give it a try, it’s way faster than going to IMDb.