Termtter

Yesterday i discovered termtter (thanks to a twit from antirez). From the author’s description:

Termtter is a twitter client software working on terminal emulators, which is very easy to extend functions

Here is a view of its interface:

Updating your status is as simple as writing u my new status at the program prompt and installing it is just a matter of doing a

sudo gem install termtter

at the terminal.

Termtter will ask you for your twitter username and password the first time it’s run, and it will write them to the ~/.termtter/config file. It would be a lot better if it used OAuth but being opensource it should be easy to add (albeit being a bit of a challenge being a terminal, client application).

The config file is also the place where you can setup and enable various plugins and extensions, e.g. :

You can post the 100th fibonacci number to twitter by (1) uncomment the line “plugin ‘fib’” and reboot termtter and (2) type “fib 100″ on the termtter. http://twitter.com/ujm/status/1330652098 from the readme

I think that “very easy to extend” is an understatement from a rubyist point of view. Writing a plugin is just a matter of creating a ruby file in the ~/.termtter/plugins directory. A plugin can contain new command definitions, status view filters and hooks to take actions on different events (e.g. before or after posting an update). There are a lot of examples in there and here is one i wrote:

It adds a retwit command (with shortcut RT) which just retwits the given update (takes a single argument, the twit ID to be retwitted).

As you can see it’s really easy to personalize Termtter to fit one’s own usage of Twitter and to experiment with it.