TTYTTER - A Clean, Simple, but Advanced Command Line Twitter Client

Twitter has many popular clients but most of them are graphical. When it comes to Linux, I am sure there would be many command line freaks who would like to know about a command line alternative. In this article, we will learn how to install and use ttytter -- one of the most popular command line Twitter clients.

ttytter

ttytter is a multi-functional, fully 100% text, Perl command line client. It supports Streaming API, ANSI colour, UTF-8, hashtags and Twitter Search.

Installation

NOTE - I have used Ubuntu 13.10 and ttytter 2.1.00 for this article.

To install this command line program, use the following steps:

• Go to its official website and download the installation script.
• Make sure that you name the downloaded script as 'ttytter'.
• Convert it into an executable file, and place it in /usr/bin.

chmod +x ttytter
sudo mv ttytter /usr/bin/.

• Check if you have curl installed. If not, then first install it by running the following command :

sudo apt-get install curl

• Also make sure that you have Perl 5.8.6 or higher installed on your system.
• Now, you can easily run the program by executing the following command:

ttytter -user=username:password -ansi

First time execution

When you execute ttytter command for the very first time, the program requires you to authenticate yourself. You will see something like this:

Once you press enter, the following screen appears :

Go to the web link provided in step-1 in the above screenshot, and you'll be asked to authorize the app.

Once you click the 'Authorize app' button, a PIN will appear at the same web interface. Write the same PIN at the command prompt, and the authentication process should succeed.

Some Useful ttytter commands

Once the first time authentication is complete, you can start accessing your Twitter account by just running the 'ttytter' command.

Observe that all the recent tweets are displayed by the client when you run it. Here are some of the useful commands that you'd like to know :

• To tweet, just write anything and hit enter.
• Use /refresh or /r to refresh.
• To reply, use  /reply [menu-code] [reply]
• To retweet, use /rt [menu-code]
• To search, use /search [query]
• For help, use /help

In case you're confused what a 'menu-code' is, it is the code that is mentioned in the beginning of each tweet. For example:

j0> <himanshuz_chd> test tweet from ttytter

In the tweet shown above, 'j0' is the menu-code.

For more information on the command, please visit the its FAQ page.