twitmail - Because some tweets you just can't afford to miss
Simply run "twitmail" and fill out the preferences and get started!
Or you can use the command line interface:
Read new twits:
# twitmail -l
---- friends ---------------------------------------------------------
01 Tue 18:33 airsax woohoo finally my DSP board plays nice with my
macbook!!! i've spent on and off the last 3
or 4 weeks working on this!
02 18:38 canusis how does it always get to be 7pm, and I haven't
even gotten started on any work yet?
tomorrow won't be any better, meetings from
11-5.
03 19:10 andrewsf After 4 crashes in 5 minutes, I'm wondering if
paper would be a more productive
alterrnative to Microsoft Word.
Update your status:
# twitmail -u is writing documentation for twitmail
Reply to an existing post (#3 ... @NAME is auto-added):
# twitmail -r 3 Maybe you should write your paper in tweets
Check for new updates (note how replies to me (@hardaker) are singled out):
# twitmail
---- replies ------------------------------------------------------
01 Tue 20:13 jasonsalas @hardaker here's that @metajack post about
bot design...good stuff! http://is.gd/bzDV
---- friends ------------------------------------------------------
02 Tue 20:24 hardaker @andrewsf Maybe you should write your paper
in tweets
twitmail implementas a "mail-like" interface to twitter. In particular, it presents it's data in a mail-reader like iterface where incoming tweets are represented as "new" when you haven't read them. It provides "reply" and "forward" actions so you can reply and retweet to the things you're staring at. Tweets are kept locally in your local database so searching through past tweets is easy with it's search facility. And most importantly, it tries to collect "all the tweets since the last time you read it", unlike the web interfaces that only show you the last 20 or so. It's designed so you never miss those important tweets from friends!
To get started, simply run "twitmail" and it'll throw you into the configuration section where you can fill out your twitter account information and a few other settings. Save the settings and you'll be placed into the reading interface with a few "help" tweets in it. There is a "help" line at the bottom of the page that shows you some of the key bindings. The ">" key will rotate through showing these helpful keybinds.
twitmail also provides a command-line client to keep track of tweets that have occured. Yes, I have fancy graphical clients to do that too. But, most of them don't easily show replies to my previous mesasges without scrolling back a ways. Especially when I've been gone for 3 days. So, twitmail was designed to accomodate that need and just print a quick summary of tweets that have arrived.
Shows all messages, not just the most recent.
MODES is a comma separated list of things to show:
Replies sent to you
Updates from friends
Show updates from all the world.
The default value is friends,replies
Updates your twitter status to MESSAGE
Replies to a particular message NUM. A @user prefix will automatically be added so all you need is the message number (the left most column in the output).
Follows a particular USER. Doesn't seem to work yet.
Tells twitmail not to save the configuration again. In particular, this means that it will not remember you've just read the messages you've read and you'll see them again next time.
Only displays COUNT messages.
(has an issue with some modes)
Things on the todo list:
Make replies indented and next to other messages
Detect that not enough messages could be retrieved and realize you skipped some.
Wes Hardaker <hardaker ATAT users.sourceforge.net>
AKA "hardaker" on twitter.com, IRC, and other places