I’ve been using ttytter for quite a while, it’s a superbly inoffensive twitter client – and it’s console-based. This makes it easy to use from the keyboard, fast, and also makes it look a bit less like twitter if that’s not something people should be seeing over your shoulder!

I have customised a few settings which I find superhelpful, so I thought I’d share my config file and say a bit about some of the entries in there. The config for ttytter is held in a file called .ttytterrc in my home directory. Mine looks like this:


ansi=1
vcheck=1
slowpost=4
mentions=1
urlopen=google-chrome %U
dmpause=0
colourme=MAGENTA
track=lornajane.net phpnw phpnw13


I want to pick out three settings in particular here: slowpost, urlopen, and track – all of them make ttytter more than just something that reads and writes twitter.

The slowpost causes ttytter to print out what you are about to tweet, and it will give you the specified number of seconds in which you can cancel before it actually does tweet it. Brilliant for those moments where you mis-spell something, reply to the wrong message, paste the wrong link, or otherwise just press return too soon. You have to be fast with the Ctrl+c but I find that 4 seconds is about right.

In ttytter I use a tool which is a godsend in irssi also – urlopen. Set the urlopen setting to whatever command is needed to open a new tab in your browser, the %U is the URL that will be opened. Very handy for situations where you either can’t (or don’t want to) click.

Finally the setting that caused me to tweet about this tool and get a demand for a blogpost earlier today: track. This adds search results containing any of your terms into the stream along with the usual set of tweets and your own mentions. As you can see, today I’m tracking news of my favourite conference as it’s announcing its schedule. This feature lets me keep an eye on things in a single stream with my tweets and whatever else, very handy!

There’s so much more than ttytter can do, such as sending growl notifications and being a really nice, easy way to send automated tweets. If you start using ttytter then let me know what you think – and if you’re already using it, please add your own top tips and config settings in the comments.