Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/marnanel/blt

blt *was* a Perl command-line twitter client. It is currently broken.
https://github.com/marnanel/blt

Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation

blt *was* a Perl command-line twitter client. It is currently broken.

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
NAME

    blt - bash loves twitter - command-line client for twitter



SYNOPSIS

     blt eating ice-cream and loving python

     blt "It's all in a day's work when you protect apostrophes"

     blt --check --public --sync



DESCRIPTION

    blt is a command-line client for twitter.com, designed to integrate

    helpfully with bash(1). It makes sending messages simple, and receiving

    them as simple as with the old biff(1) program which told you when you

    had new mail.



WHAT IS TWITTER?

    Twitter is a blogging system which limits posts (known as "tweets") to

    140 characters. This means that users can receive them easily over text

    messaging, instant messaging, and so on.



    Twitter allows you to send three kinds of messages:



    Public The ordinary kind, directed at everyone, to tell them what you're

    currently doing or thinking.

    Directed which are pointed at one particular user, but still public.

    These contain "@username". A user can opt to not be told about directed

    messages not aimed at people they know.

    Private These are only seen by the sender and the recipient. blt can

    send these using the "d" notation (see the -s mode below) but does not

    yet show them when you ask it to check.



MODES

    These are all lowercase letters, and you may have exactly one of them.

    The default mode is s. You may "bundle" the short forms of modes and

    switches together.



    -s, --set

        Send a message to Twitter. The rest of the line is the message to

        send. If this begins with "d" and a space, and then a username and a

        space, this will send a private message to that user. This is a

        Twitter convention and not part of the design of blt.



    -c, --check

        Checks whether recent messages have come in for you.



    -a user, --as=user

        Uses the given user's details rather than the default user. This

        makes no difference on the public timeline.



    -v, --version

        Prints the current version number and exits.



    -h, --help

        Prints some basic help and exits.



SWITCHES

    These are all capitals; you may combine as many as you wish.



    -F, --force

        Check even if we checked recently. Overuse of this option may

        transgress Twitter's acceptable use policy. This is silently ignored

        if we're reading the public timeline, because there is no cache

        requirement there anyway.



    -S, --sync

        Don't return until all the information has been gathered and

        printing (see ASYNCHRONICITY below).



    -P, --public

        Read the public timeline, and not a user's timeline. This may only

        be combined with checking, not setting; an attempt to set on the

        public timeline causes an error.



        No caching is required. Nor is any authentication; hence this is the

        only instance when ~/.bltrc.xml need not exist, and blt will not

        attempt to create it if it is not found.



THE PUBLIC TIMELINE

        The public timmeline is a list of all public posts made to twitter

        in the last few seconds. Unlike all other modes, the public timeline

        does not require any authentication on your part.



        You can read the public timeline with no configuration file. This

        will mean that the minimum time between fetching each new set of

        information from Twitter is 60 seconds.



ASYNCHRONICITY

        If you are checking a timeline on Twitter, you can run blt either

        synchronously (with -S) or asynchronously (without -S). If you run

        it synchronously, it will go away and fetch the information from

        twitter.com and not return until it's done.



        If you run it asynchronously, though, one of three things will

        happen:



        *   There can be twitter information stored in blt's cache; if so,

            it will print this and exit.



        *   Otherwise, if no blt background process is running, blt will

            start one and exit. The background process will get the

            information from twitter and then exit.



        *   Otherwise there b a background process running, so blt

            leaves it alone and exits.



        Asynchronous mode exists because Twitter can be very slow to respond

        sometimes, although this has been improving recently.



HOW BASH CALLS BLT

        bash(1) calls the program given in the variable PROMPT_COMMAND every

        time you press return. When you create a ~/.bltrc.xml, blt also

        attempts to insert a line into ~/.bashrc setting this variable so

        that blt will be called every time you press return.



THE CONFIGURATION FILE

        The configuration file is a simple piece f XML called ~/.bltrc.xml.

        Its root node is bltrc, which has one attribute, interval. This is

        the minimum time that must pass between fetching information from

        Twitter. (The Twitter acceptable use policy requires this to be at

        least 52 seconds.)



        Within this root element are a number of ac elements, each

        representing an account, with id and pass elements. On initial

        creation, only one account exists. You may add new accounts in the

        same format and select them using the -a switch; see above under

        SWITCHES.



BUGS

        * It can send but not receive private/direct messages.

        * blt is pretty fast, but you still might not want to run blt from

        ~/.bashrc on a particularly slow computer.



AUTHOR

        Thomas Thurman, tthurman at gnome dot org.