I enjoy communicating with Twitter, talking to all of the friends I’ve made over the past few years at conferences, events, etc. I enjoy many of the Twitter clients out there like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Nambu, and others. The one thing I don’t enjoy? Every Twitter client seems to have a large memory footprint. Leave any of them running and you’ll be sacrificing up to a gigabyte of RAM for them to manage your Twitter experience when you follow and are followed by over 10,000 people.
That’s why, despite all the cool new features in all of the clients being rolled out, I really wanted a command line client. Old school black and green terminal command line, minimal memory footprint, zero graphic footprint, no need for Java or Adobe AIR or even a web browser.
Enter TTYtter, a Twitter client written in Perl (using cUrl and a few other libraries) that should run out of the box on any recent Mac. It follows the timeline, sets apart @replies and DMs, lets me pull profile information, and pretty much everything that every other Twitter app supports.
Popular hashtag? I can set up a one-shot search or keep track of it. Replies in the public timeline? No problem.
It’s a thing of beauty to have a super-lightweight Twitter client, especially if I’m on an EVDO or other mobile connection where connection is spotty and data economy is at a premium.
You can try it out for yourself by downloading TTYtter from here. I will warn you that it is not for the technologically faint of heart. If you’ve never run something from the command line, this might be a little outside your comfort zone…
… but then, isn’t that part of the fun of new media?
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