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Introducing T: A command-line power tool for Twitter (sferik.github.com)
213 points by sferik on April 24, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments



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??


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


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


[deleted]


Why do you consider it sexist? Certainly can't assume everybody will share your viewpoint, though I'm willing to listen to yours.


[deleted]


Edit: The deleted comment here said "would you admit that you liked the name to your mother or investors?"

Answer: No, because it's crass and lacks decorum. Now explain how it's sexist toward women.


(because it is)


No, it isn't. I'm not a big fan of dictionaries but they must serve when basic English literacy fails, so here:

"titter: to laugh in a nervous, affected, or partly suppressed manner : giggle, snicker"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/titter


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.


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.


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.


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.


"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.


It was just an exercise. Maybe I'll name the next one "xfwkl".


Agreed, but, that's not really an answer to the question I'm asking. I also don't think OP, the author of 'clit', intends for it to supplant Tweetdeck ... it seems like a one-off that he slapped a name on and threw on Github.


you can't fix sexism (or racism, or classism) by pretending they don't exist. this isn't the venue for a debate on the topic, but you can read up on male privilege if you'd like to know more


"Titter" is a word having nothing to do with gender.

"None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a chattering titter." The Island of Doctor Moreau, HG Wells


Following the comment thread, it would appear that the original 'sexism' comment was referring to https://github.com/ricardobeat/clit


CLI is the recognized, time-honoured, universal abbreviation for "command line interface". Given that, I don't see a problem with using it as a prefix.


Looks cool! And very geeky :)


You beat me to it. I only know Cameron from his work and his mailing list. His Retrobits site is a kick:

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/


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


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.)


> 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.


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


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/.


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.


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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.


"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.


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

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


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


Hell yeah, I used this for a long time on my 486. I think I even submitted some patches.


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...


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


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

Does the job as a simple Twitter client.


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.


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?


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.


Ah, I see. Makes perfect sense.


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.


This is completely awesome! sferik rocks


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


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


Used this to scrape through past tweets - totally handy!


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


Wow, this looks awesome. Great job.




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