tweetwine

DESCRIPTION

Tweetwine shows the latest tweets from the command line quickly.

The program can show the home timeline of the authenticated user, the latest tweets of friends and followers, and the latest tweets that mention the user. If that's not enough, Tweetwine can search statuses with arbitrary terms and send status updates.

Features:

Simple to use command line interface, with Bash completion support
ANSI coloring of statuses, but in discreet manner
Supports shortening URLs in a status update with a configurable shortening service
Configuration file for preferred settings

INSTALL

Install Tweetwine with RubyGems:

$ gem install tweetwine

The program is tested with MRI 1.8.7, 1.9.2, and 1.9.3.

The program requires oauth gem to be installed. In addition, the program needs a JSON parser library, such as json gem, on Ruby 1.8.

This documentation page is also provided as a manual page. Use gem-man to see it:

$ gem man tweetwine

BASIC USAGE AND CONFIGURATION

In the command line, run the program by entering

$ tweetwine [global_options..] [command] [command_options...]

For all the global options and commands, see:

$ tweetwine help

For information about a specific command and its options, enter:

$ tweetwine help <command>

In order to use to use the program, you must authorize it to access your account on Twitter. This is done with OAuth protocol, and it is required when the program is launched for the first time. After that, Tweetwine remembers the access you granted by storing the access token into ~/.tweetwine. The file serves as your configuration file.

Because the access token is sensitive information, Tweetwine obfuscates it when storing it into the configuration file. While this prevents simple plain text reading attempts of the access token, it is not secure. You should restrict access to the file only to yourself. If the configuration file does not exist before running the program, Tweetwine sets the file accessible only to you when storing the access token.

The configuration file is in YAML syntax. In addition to the OAuth access token, the program recognizes the following settings:

colors: true|false
username: <your_username>

URL shortening for a status update

Before actually sending a new status update, it is possible for the software to shorten the URLs in the tweet by using an external web service. This can be enabled via shorten_urls field in the configuration file; for example:

username: spoonman
colors: true
show_reverse: true
shorten_urls:
  service_url: http://is.gd/create.php
  method: post
  url_param_name: url
  xpath_selector: //input[@id='short_url']/@value
  disable: false    # optional

The supported HTTP request methods (in method field) are get and post. The method chosen affects whether parameters are passed as URL query parameters or as payload in the HTTP request, respectively. Extra parameters can be given via extra_params field, as a hash.

The xpath_selector field is needed to locate the HTML element which contains the shortened URL from the HTTP response.

URL shortening can be disabled by not defining shorten_urls field in the configuration file, or by setting optional field disable to true. In order to disable shortening only temporarily, use the command line option --no-url-shorten.

NOTE: The use of URL shortening requires nokogiri gem to be installed.

HTTP proxy setting

If $http_proxy environment variable is set, Tweetwine attempts to use the URL in the environment variable as HTTP proxy for its HTTP connections. This setting can be overridden with --http-proxy and --no-http-proxy command line options.

Bash command line completion support

Bash shell supports command line completion via tab character. If you want to enable Tweetwine specific completion with Bash, source the file tweetwine-completion.bash, located in contrib directory:

. contrib/tweetwine-completion.bash

In order to do this automatically when your shell starts, insert the following snippet to your Bash initialization script (such as ~/.bashrc):

if [ -f <path_to_tweetwine>/contrib/tweetwine-completion.bash ]; then
    . <path_to_tweetwine>/contrib/tweetwine-completion.bash
fi