bird
bird is a simple interactive console Twitter client.
Contents
Status
This is a fully-functional modular Twitter client, used by me (@dr_lepper).
Features
- Displaying tweets and sending own tweets,
- Color highlighting of replies, own tweets and replies to you,
- Full retweets support,
- Executing arbitrary Python statements,
(module autostatus) Setting your IM status to your last tweet or retweet,
(module blacklist) Blacklisting tweets by author (useful to filter out unwanted retweets) or any other field (useful to filter out girls' tweets about Apple and Starbucks),
(module browser) Opening URLs from tweets in your browser.
(module delete) Deleting own tweets,
(module follow) Following/unfollowing users,
(module longtweets) Automatic splitting of long tweets,
(module threads) Unfolding conversation threads,
(module translate) Translating tweets using Google Translate,
(module unshorten) Automatic unshortening of shortened URLs,
(module userpics_aa) Display of userpics in ASCII-art using libaa.
Usage
bird comes in one single file bird.py. You can download it here: (http://git.hades.name/cgit.cgi/bird.git/plain/bird.py). Then just simply run it.
Prerequisites
bird has one dependency:
twython (https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/twython).
In Gentoo, for now this package is available in Aeacus only. You can follow the procedure of its adoption here: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356235
Built-in commands
Commands start with symbol '/'. Everything else will be posted to your Twitter.
/exec expression — evaluate an arbitrary Python expression. Don't forget to use print() if you want something to be output.
/help — show the list of available commands
/load modulename — load external module modulename
/quit — quit
/re key text — reply to a status with key key (keys are those two-character codes in braces before the tweets)
/rt key — retweet a status
/save — save changed configuration variables
/set variable value — set a variable to a given value. Omit the new value to show current value
Built-in variables
Variables are stored (by default) in "~/.config/birdrc" in an INI-file. To access them in runtime use "/set". To save changed values use "/save".
mentions (on/off) — include mentions in the timeline
modules — list of modules to load at startup
colors (on/off) — colorize output
Various colors can be also changed in the config:
color.author — author of the status (the text between angle braces)
color.error — error messages
color.own — tweets by YOU
color.reply — replies to another status
color.tweet — ordinary tweets
color.warn — warning messages
Modules
autostatus
Retrieves your last tweet and sets your current status in IM clients to its text.
Supported IM clients
gajim (/set autostatus.client gajim) (note that D-Bus support is required),
Psi (/set autostatus.client psi),
- test client (/set autostatus.client test) — does nothing but print what would autostatus set your status to, had you configured it properly.
Variables
autostatus.client — type of IM client (see above),
autostatus.ignorereplies — if True, autostatus will not set your status to your last tweet if it is a reply to another Twitter user.
blacklist
Filters tweets based on user ID and any other tweet field.
Commands
/blacklist username — add given user to the blacklist. Omit username to show current blacklist.
/blackfield field regexp — add given list to the blacklist entries for field field. Omit regexp to remove all blacklist entries.
Blacklist is stored in config. Don't forget to save it with /save
browser
Author: Tatiana Gornak
Opens the URL from the given tweet with your browser.
Commands
/browse key url numbers — open URLs with given numbers from tweet with key key. If there is only one URL in tweet, you can omit the numbers
Variables
browser.agent — executable name to open URLs with,
browser.foreground (on/off) — when on, Bird is suspended until your browser quits,
browser.verify (on/off) — when on, Bird will first try to open URL itself to check if it exists.
delete
Author: Tatiana Gornak
Allows you to delete your tweets.
Commands
/delete key — delete tweet with key key
follow
Allows you to edit your followers list.
Commands
/follow username — start following username
/unfollow username — stop following username
longtweets
Splits long tweets into several shorter tweets.
threads
Unfold the conversation threads.
Commands
/thread key — trace the conversation that preceeds the given tweet key.
translate
Author: Tatiana Gornak
Translates the tweets.
Commands
/translate key from-to — translates tweet with key key from language from to to.
Variables
translate.from — the default language to translate from. If you set this, you can omit it in /translate command.
translate.to — the default language to translate to. If you set both these variables, you can omit the language spec as a whole.
unshorten
Replaces short URLs in domains like bit.ly and goo.gl into the full URLs.
Variables
unshorten.allow — a space-separated list of additional domains that are URL shorteners
userpics_aa
Draws userpics of your friends in ASCII-art using Aalib.
Prerequisites
python-aalib (http://jwilk.net/software/python-aalib)
Python Imaging Library (http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/)
Variables
userpics_aa.width, userpics_aa.height (integer) — dimensions (in characters) of the drawings
verify
Prints you everything bird is going to do, so that you can double-check it.
Commands
/commit — send everything bird just asked you to verify
Acknowledgements
The project is largely a Python rewrite of this project (http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/) by Floodgap.
Development
You can get the sources with the following command: git clone git://git.hades.name/bird.git