Tag Archives: TTYtter

mmtter: a front end for TTYtter

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If you know much about my Twitter habits, you know I’m a bit fan of Cameron Kaiser’s TTYtter. I’ve written in the past about using it to follow event streams, but one limitation was that it was hard to consistently tweet event messages. For example, when you send a tweet from a UStream feed, it includes the feed’s hashtag and a URL to the stream. This is a great way to lure in viewers.

Since TTYtter has easy support for posting messages from the command line, I figured it would be an easy task to write a wrapper that would automatically include the relevant information so that I wouldn’t have to copy/paste every time. The result is mmtter, a small Perl script to pass the arguments to TTYtter. So far, it just checks to make sure the tweet is short enough and then mashes the text onto the end. Since it blindly grabs the arguments from the shell, you have to carefully escape special characters. Future “enhancements” will include the ability to prepend a string. In the meantime, you can get it from GitHub: http://www.github.com/funnelfiasco/mmtter

While you’re enjoying my minutes of hard work, be sure to watch the Mario Marathon and donate using the happy little button on the right-hand side of this page.

My TTYtter configuration

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It’s been many months since I found out about TTYtter, a command line Twitter client written in Perl.  Though some users might bemoan the lack of a snazzy graphical interface, it is that very lack which appeals to me.  TTYtter places only a very tiny load on system resources, which means my Twitter addiction won’t get in the way of running VMs to test various configurations and procedures.  Being command-line based, I can run it in a screen session which means that I can resume my Twittering from wherever I happen to be and not have to re-configure my client.

I don’t claim to be a TTYtter expert, but I thought I’d share my own configuration for other newbs.  TTYtter looks in $HOME/.ttytterrc by default, and here’s my default configuration:

#Check to see if I'm running the current version
vcheck=1
# What hash tags do I care about?
track='#Purdue #OSMacTalk #MarioMarathon'
# Colors, etc are good!
ansi=1
# I'm dumb. Prompt me before a tweet posts
verify=1
# Use some readline magic
readline=1
# Check for mentions from people I don't follow
mentions=1

Of course, there are certain times that the default configuration isn’t what I want.  When I was reading tweets in rapid-fire succession during the Mario Marathon, I didn’t want non-Mario tweets to get in the way, so I used a separate configuration file:

# Don't log in and burn up my rate limit
anonymous=1
# Find tweets related to the marathon
track=#MarioMarathon "Mario Marathon"
# Don't show my normal timeline
notimeline=1
# Colors, etc are awesome!
ansi=1
# Only update when I say so. This keeps the tweet I'm in the middle of reading
#      from being scrolled right off my screen
synch

There are a lot of other ways that TTYtter can be used, and I’m sure @doctorlinguist will tell me all of the ways I’m doing things wrong, but if you’re in the market for a new, multi-platform Twitter client, you should give this one a try.