

Introducing T: A command-line power tool for Twitter - sferik
http://sferik.github.com/t/

======
jazzychad
A brief plug for my friend's command line tool 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
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>

~~~
jimmy2times
Love the name (though I'm sure many would consider it sexist).

~~~
gilrain
(because it is)

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jsprinkles
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.

~~~
gilrain
It's not my job to teach you Sexism 101, so I'll be brief. It reinforces to
the minority of women in tech that they will be routinely otherized by their
colleagues.

~~~
jsprinkles
I'll ignore the pointless first statement just as you ignored several of my
questions. If you don't want people questioning your opinions, don't share
them publicly.

How, exactly, does the choice of name minimize women? If a woman wrote 'clit',
would you say the same thing? If a woman wrote 'dong', would we call her
sexist? I understand the problem, but we're really throwing the baby out with
the bathwater here. An effective solution to stamping out sexism in the
workplace does not, in my opinion, hinge upon commanding people to ignore the
presence of their sexual organs and doing so is, I think, more damaging.

I don't want to live in a world where the mere mention of a body part launches
an accusation of sexism. Neither do several women in tech that I know. Can we
agree that in certain cases, we're being a touch _too_ sensitive when it comes
to fixing the problem, and we should really choose more important battles than
accusing a dev of sexism due to the name of a one-off, pointless Twitter
client that he's not billing as the next Tweetdeck?

Fix sexism: Treat everybody equally, regardless of gender identity.

Don't fix sexism: Pretend gender identity and, by extension, sex, doesn't
exist.

~~~
pudquick
With a universe of possible ASCII combinations to choose from - just because a
particular iteration is witty, it does not automatically exclude it from
offending one or more groups of people (whatever the reasoning).

If you want widespread adoption of your tool, your best bet is to try to
offend as few groups as possible.

~~~
uptown
"If you want widespread adoption of your tool, your best bet is to try to
offend as few groups as possible."

I don't agree with this at all. Sometimes things are successful for the very
fact that they're divisive. If your priority is to not offend anyone, you run
the risk of being forgotten by everyone.

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luigi
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>

Also:

<https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake>

~~~
adambyrtek
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.)

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apike
> 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
Why is this bad? It sounds like a great way to clean up. (I don't use twitter
much)

~~~
apike
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/>.

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mmahemoff
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.

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trafnar
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.

------
chadyj
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>

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huhtenberg
Does anyone remember mICQ, the command-line ICQ client? Man, it was _awesome_.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/micq>

~~~
tshtf
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>

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

~~~
arakawa
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.

~~~
bodyfour
"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.

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davej
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_frie...](http://forrst.com/posts/Keep_your_twitter_followers_and_friends_in_sync-0uU)

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

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Aissen
Not as powerful, but written in pure C: bti <https://github.com/gregkh/bti>

Does the job as a simple Twitter client.

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robertskmiles
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.

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methoddk
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
I was torn about what to call them. I actually tweeted a request for
suggestions: <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
Ah, I see. Makes perfect sense.

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jondot
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.

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brettgo1
This is completely awesome! sferik rocks

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

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

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seppo
Used this to scrape through past tweets - totally handy!

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

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kmf
Wow, this looks awesome. Great job.

