A Utility That Makes You Master of the Twitterverse

You can do a lot more with Twitter than the official Web, mobile and desktop clients allow. To do it, though, you’ll need to access Twitter’s API — or use a tool that digs deeper into the API than the usual clients. If you’re comfortable with a command line interface, or willing to learn how to use one, t gives you simple, fine-grained control over your Twitter stream.

The one-letter Ruby gem, t, is written by Erik Michaels-Ober. The source is available on GitHub, or you can just grab it using Ruby’s gem install command. Ruby is on most *nix type systems by default (Linux distributions, Mac OS X) but Windows users will need to download the installer to get started.

After you’ve installed the t gem, you’ll need to authorize it. You can use it without getting API access, but then you’re limited to 150 requests per hour, and you can’t use t to post a Twitter message or make changes to your account.

Using t

To see all of the commands available via t, just run t help. You’ll find that t supports more than 40 commands, or tasks as its documentation calls them. The syntax is simple: t followed by the task name, and any options and arguments.

For example, you can use t to get all of the followers for an account by running t followers username. Note that you don’t need to include the @ in front of a username.

Many of the commands are mundane operations that you can do with any Twitter client. For example, posting a status update or following another user. Running t update "message goes here" will post an update, running t follow username will follow the user that you specify, and so on.

If you’re a command-line diehard, then you might prefer using t for those operations. But its real value is in doing things you can’t do with most Twitter clients. Want to see a list of users who follow you but whom you don’t follow? Run t groupies. You can also use that command to check on other users, t groupies username.

The most interesting thing about t is that it works well with other *nix commands. For example, you can create a list (t list create listname) and add all users who are followed by another user (t followings user