6 ms·

Introducing T: A command-line power tool for Twitter

213 points by sferik 14y ago

jondot 14y ago
Hi sferik, This is excellent!, T is just great to remove all of the noise and concentrate on the gist of what you need to do.
seppo 14y ago
Used this to scrape through past tweets - totally handy!
kmf 14y ago
Wow, this looks awesome. Great job.
brettgo1 14y ago
This is completely awesome! sferik rocks
mmahemoff 14y ago
Slightly OT, a little power user tip for people using twitter.com is hit "?" and you'll see there's actually a ton of keyboard shortcuts in there. Much more than j and k for navigation.
jgv 14y ago
I like the relationship terminology T introduces. Looks like managing lists will be a breeze with this too.
joshontheweb 14y ago
Love at first sight. Now it's easier than ever to appear busy at work while tweeting.
leif 14y ago
I don't know if it still works, but rubygems.org/gems/tit
davej 14y ago
I wrote a similar but far more simple script in Python to follow all those who follow you and unfollow those who unfollow you. Take a look if your interested: http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_friends_in_sync-0uU http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_frie...
huhtenberg 14y ago
Does anyone remember mICQ, the command-line ICQ client? Man, it was awesome. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq
- tshtf 14y ago
  Bitlbee is a good modern alternative. Text support in IRC for OSCAR (AIM or ICQ), MSN, XMPP, Twitter, Skype etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitlBee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitlBee
- jcurbo 14y ago
  Hell yeah, I used this for a long time on my 486. I think I even submitted some patches.
trafnar 14y ago
I've been using this for a while. This lets you effectively search your historic tweets which for me is a killer feature. Sometimes I think of things I'd like to do with Twitter but I don't do them because it would require writing some custom script. Using t many of these ideas are easy to just do quickly from the command line.
luigi 14y ago
Termtter has been around for years. It does bad ass things like automate the Twitter OAuth process, stream live updates, and it has terminal colors: https://github.com/termtter/termtter https://github.com/termtter/termtter Also: https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake
- adambyrtek 14y ago
  I heard about at least a dozen of different command line Twitter client, most of which are just experimental projects. Which one would you really recommend for daily use? (This is a general question, not directly related to projects mentioned in the parent comment.)
jazzychad 14y ago
A brief plug for my friend's command line tool TTYtter: http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ super-crazy powerful, has an interactive mode, is scriptable, etc, etc... Also, I'm glad you are able to manipulate lists in T by just typing names (t list add presidents BarackObama Jasonfinn). This is a _total_ pain on the website where you can only manipulate lists by clicking about 5 buttons per person you want to add/drop from a list. Why can't I just type a list of names??
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  I also built a similar tool around an year ago, much simpler though (was an exercise in implementing OAuth): https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit#readme https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit#readme
  - jimmy2times 14y ago
    Love the name (though I'm sure many would consider it sexist).
    - gilrain 14y ago
      (because it is)
      - jsprinkles 14y ago
        Can you elaborate on why? It's an honest question, because I genuinely don't understand why. Good to see the 'ole downvote-without-discussion at work, too. I understand sexism to be about discriminating based on gender. Does it also mean "naming software a body part a certain gender happens to have?" If I name my software "penis", or "testicle" (a great name for a tongue-in-cheek test suite) am I going to be accused of being sexist toward men? As for "clit", can I understand potentially offensive to certain people who are sensitive to sexual matters? Sure. Demeaning or discriminatory to women? Please convince me of it. I think the sexism brush is getting really loose, and it's such a strong, legally-damaging word to throw around.
methoddk 14y ago
So if someone follows me, and I don't follow them back, I become their leader? /me unfollows everyone on a serious note: Leaders? too cool for school?
- sferik 14y ago
  I was torn about what to call them. I actually tweeted a request for suggestions: https://twitter.com/sferik/status/193015186045681665 https://twitter.com/sferik/status/193015186045681665 I got some interesting replies but ended up going with "leaders" based on the logic that if someone follows you, you are their leader. Simple and easy to remember. That said, I'm still open to other suggestions.
  - methoddk 14y ago
    Ah, I see. Makes perfect sense.
reustle 14y ago
Am I the only one who hates how some projects are named like this?
- arakawa 14y ago
  The thing that struck me is that there are no one letter commands in UNIX (that I can remember off the top of my head). Not sure if there's any reason for this besides namespace scarcity -- only 26 one-letter commands you can have! It feels pretty arbitrary, I guess, to decide that Twitter is special enough that it gets to be one of the 26.
  - technomancy 14y ago
    I like to think of it as reserving the 1-letter namespace for personal shell aliases. Everyone's going to have a different set of 26 most commonly-used commands.
  - bodyfour 14y ago
    "w" is standard on most UNIX machines, At one time, "f" was a link to "finger" on many machines, but I think that's mostly died out now. And of course there's "X", although you usually don't run that yourself at the command line unless you're debugging something.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
jhull 14y ago
just used this to follow/unfollow automagically. its against Twitter ToS but every now and then never hurt anyone.
apike 14y ago
> Unfollow everyone you follow who doesn't follow you back > t leaders | xargs t unfollow This is an interesting way to circumvent the Twitter API guidelines - the above feature is disallowed and will get your key revoked. However, since each t user has their own key, enforcing this is implausible other than by throttling the rate at which you can unfollow people. To be clear, I don't support people trying to do this in the first place, but it's a clever hack nonetheless.
- darkstar999 14y ago
  Why is this bad? It sounds like a great way to clean up. (I don't use twitter much)
  - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
    Twitter has certain ideas about how their product should be used, and try to enforce those. Unfollowing everyone who doesn't follow you puts some pressure on people to follow people who they would not otherwise follow, which makes them less happy with Twitter.
  - apike 14y ago
    Unfollowing everybody who doesn't follow you is a sign that you don't actually follow people to read them, but instead follow people to generate spammy emails and increase your followers count. Some people get agitated by this behaviour because either: 1. They are only willing to receive follow emails about people who are actually going to read their content - otherwise it's effectively spam 2. High following counts are a quick signal to help ignore spammy email, but spammy people mitigate this by unfollowing people who didn't follow back due to their spammy emails If you'd like to clean up your following list to make it more readable, I'd suggest unfollowing a handful of high-volume tweeters, or using a tool like my Unladen Follow http://www.unladenfollow.com/ http://www.unladenfollow.com/.
chadyj 14y ago
Earthquake is my favorite terminal based twitter client with streaming API support. Made with ruby. To tweet it is simply "⚡ Hello World!". https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake
Aissen 14y ago
Not as powerful, but written in pure C: bti https://github.com/gregkh/bti https://github.com/gregkh/bti Does the job as a simple Twitter client.
robertskmiles 14y ago
The relationship terminology looks neat, but the ASCII table looks pretty messed up for me. Maybe an HTML <table> tag is the right tool for the job here.

213 points by sferik 14y ago

Hi sferik, This is excellent!, T is just great to remove all of the noise and concentrate on the gist of what you need to do.

seppo 14y ago

Used this to scrape through past tweets - totally handy!

kmf 14y ago

Wow, this looks awesome. Great job.

brettgo1 14y ago

This is completely awesome! sferik rocks

mmahemoff 14y ago

Slightly OT, a little power user tip for people using twitter.com is hit "?" and you'll see there's actually a ton of keyboard shortcuts in there. Much more than j and k for navigation.

jgv 14y ago

I like the relationship terminology T introduces. Looks like managing lists will be a breeze with this too.

joshontheweb 14y ago

Love at first sight. Now it's easier than ever to appear busy at work while tweeting.

leif 14y ago

I don't know if it still works, but rubygems.org/gems/tit

davej 14y ago

I wrote a similar but far more simple script in Python to follow all those who follow you and unfollow those who unfollow you. Take a look if your interested: http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_friends_in_sync-0uU http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_frie...

huhtenberg 14y ago

Does anyone remember mICQ, the command-line ICQ client? Man, it was awesome. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq

tshtf 14y ago
Bitlbee is a good modern alternative. Text support in IRC for OSCAR (AIM or ICQ), MSN, XMPP, Twitter, Skype etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitlBee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitlBee
jcurbo 14y ago
Hell yeah, I used this for a long time on my 486. I think I even submitted some patches.

trafnar 14y ago

I've been using this for a while. This lets you effectively search your historic tweets which for me is a killer feature. Sometimes I think of things I'd like to do with Twitter but I don't do them because it would require writing some custom script. Using t many of these ideas are easy to just do quickly from the command line.

luigi 14y ago

Termtter has been around for years. It does bad ass things like automate the Twitter OAuth process, stream live updates, and it has terminal colors: https://github.com/termtter/termtter https://github.com/termtter/termtter Also: https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake

adambyrtek 14y ago
I heard about at least a dozen of different command line Twitter client, most of which are just experimental projects. Which one would you really recommend for daily use? (This is a general question, not directly related to projects mentioned in the parent comment.)

jazzychad 14y ago

A brief plug for my friend's command line tool TTYtter: http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ super-crazy powerful, has an interactive mode, is scriptable, etc, etc... Also, I'm glad you are able to manipulate lists in T by just typing names (t list add presidents BarackObama Jasonfinn). This is a _total_ pain on the website where you can only manipulate lists by clicking about 5 buttons per person you want to add/drop from a list. Why can't I just type a list of names??

ricardobeat 14y ago
I also built a similar tool around an year ago, much simpler though (was an exercise in implementing OAuth): https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit#readme https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit#readme
- jimmy2times 14y ago
  Love the name (though I'm sure many would consider it sexist).
  - gilrain 14y ago
    (because it is)
    - jsprinkles 14y ago
      Can you elaborate on why? It's an honest question, because I genuinely don't understand why. Good to see the 'ole downvote-without-discussion at work, too. I understand sexism to be about discriminating based on gender. Does it also mean "naming software a body part a certain gender happens to have?" If I name my software "penis", or "testicle" (a great name for a tongue-in-cheek test suite) am I going to be accused of being sexist toward men? As for "clit", can I understand potentially offensive to certain people who are sensitive to sexual matters? Sure. Demeaning or discriminatory to women? Please convince me of it. I think the sexism brush is getting really loose, and it's such a strong, legally-damaging word to throw around.

methoddk 14y ago

So if someone follows me, and I don't follow them back, I become their leader? /me unfollows everyone on a serious note: Leaders? too cool for school?

sferik 14y ago
I was torn about what to call them. I actually tweeted a request for suggestions: https://twitter.com/sferik/status/193015186045681665 https://twitter.com/sferik/status/193015186045681665 I got some interesting replies but ended up going with "leaders" based on the logic that if someone follows you, you are their leader. Simple and easy to remember. That said, I'm still open to other suggestions.
- methoddk 14y ago
  Ah, I see. Makes perfect sense.

reustle 14y ago

Am I the only one who hates how some projects are named like this?

arakawa 14y ago
The thing that struck me is that there are no one letter commands in UNIX (that I can remember off the top of my head). Not sure if there's any reason for this besides namespace scarcity -- only 26 one-letter commands you can have! It feels pretty arbitrary, I guess, to decide that Twitter is special enough that it gets to be one of the 26.
- technomancy 14y ago
  I like to think of it as reserving the 1-letter namespace for personal shell aliases. Everyone's going to have a different set of 26 most commonly-used commands.
- bodyfour 14y ago
  "w" is standard on most UNIX machines, At one time, "f" was a link to "finger" on many machines, but I think that's mostly died out now. And of course there's "X", although you usually don't run that yourself at the command line unless you're debugging something.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

jhull 14y ago

just used this to follow/unfollow automagically. its against Twitter ToS but every now and then never hurt anyone.

apike 14y ago

> Unfollow everyone you follow who doesn't follow you back > t leaders | xargs t unfollow This is an interesting way to circumvent the Twitter API guidelines - the above feature is disallowed and will get your key revoked. However, since each t user has their own key, enforcing this is implausible other than by throttling the rate at which you can unfollow people. To be clear, I don't support people trying to do this in the first place, but it's a clever hack nonetheless.

darkstar999 14y ago
Why is this bad? It sounds like a great way to clean up. (I don't use twitter much)
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  Twitter has certain ideas about how their product should be used, and try to enforce those. Unfollowing everyone who doesn't follow you puts some pressure on people to follow people who they would not otherwise follow, which makes them less happy with Twitter.
- apike 14y ago
  Unfollowing everybody who doesn't follow you is a sign that you don't actually follow people to read them, but instead follow people to generate spammy emails and increase your followers count. Some people get agitated by this behaviour because either: 1. They are only willing to receive follow emails about people who are actually going to read their content - otherwise it's effectively spam 2. High following counts are a quick signal to help ignore spammy email, but spammy people mitigate this by unfollowing people who didn't follow back due to their spammy emails If you'd like to clean up your following list to make it more readable, I'd suggest unfollowing a handful of high-volume tweeters, or using a tool like my Unladen Follow http://www.unladenfollow.com/ http://www.unladenfollow.com/.

chadyj 14y ago

Earthquake is my favorite terminal based twitter client with streaming API support. Made with ruby. To tweet it is simply "⚡ Hello World!". https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake

Aissen 14y ago

Not as powerful, but written in pure C: bti https://github.com/gregkh/bti https://github.com/gregkh/bti Does the job as a simple Twitter client.

robertskmiles 14y ago

The relationship terminology looks neat, but the ASCII table looks pretty messed up for me. Maybe an HTML <table> tag is the right tool for the job here.