twitching, an Emacs client for Twitter

Twitching is an Emacs Twitter client to get tweets from a user's followers.

History

Twitching was written with two primary goals in mind:

1. Get tweets from all followed users without losing any.
2. The ability to filter some tweets from the timeline.

Features

1. Periodically download your timeline and show them in a buffer.
2. Favorite tweets.
3. Navigate easily through your tweets. Use Emacs's C-s and C-r to quickly find tweets.
4. Filters - probably the best feature of twitching. If you're really irritated that all your tweets have something annoying like #RoyalWedding, set up a filter on that hashtag and your Twitter feed is cleared of all tweets with it. Filters are persistent so future tweets that match will also be filtered away.
5. Remove - Same as filters but without persistence.
6. Group - This provides a way to show all your tweets ordered by the tweeters. Comes in two flavors: group all tweets, or group only the tweets of a single user.
7. Follow/UnFollow users.
8. Open a hashtag in a browser. If you see a few tweets with #interviewswithhari and want to see more you can open it up on the browser. This is currently not supported as viewing in Emacs.
9. Open a user mention in the browser. Same as 8, but for user mentions in tweets.
10. Copy specific parts of a tweet and put it into the kill-ring. For example, c t copies the tweet text, and c s copies the current tweet's status id.

Missing Features

Twitching does not provide a way to perform any of Twitter's "social networking" features.

As is right now, there is no way to compose a tweet, reply to a tweet or retweet. There's no way to get tweets where you're mentioned either.

Contributions to do these are of course welcome. They aren't on the TODO list though.

Upcoming Features

See the TODO file included with the package for details on upcoming features.

Usage

Before you use twitching, you must have a Twitter consumer token and consumer token secret. If you don't already have one, see the section below on Getting a consumer-key and consumer-secret for details.

Installation

To use twitching, put the files twitching.el, oauth.el, json.el and hmac-sha1.el in a directory and add this directory to your Emacs load-path.

Add the below lines to your .emacs file.

;;; Twitter mode in Emacs
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/twitching")
(autoload 'start-twitching "twitching" "Start Twitching timer" t)
(autoload 'twitching-show-favorites "twitching" "show favorite tweets" t)
(autoload 'twitching-home-timeline-get "twitching" "Get Twitter home page" t)

Downloading tweets

Downloading your home timeline once

To just download your tweets, do M-x twitching-home-timeline-get. This will work even if the timer is running.

Your tweets will be shown in the buffer *Twitching*.

Periodically downloading tweets

To periodically fetch your tweets type M-x start-twitching. This will start a timer that downloads your tweets periodically and put them in the buffer *Twitching*.

The default value of this timer is set to run every 5 minutes, but it can be customized by changing the value of *twitching-timer-interval*. Simply add the following line to your .emacs file.

(setq *twitching-timer-interval* SECONDS)

where SECONDS is the new interval period. If you have already started the timer, you will need to stop it and start it again for the new interval to take effect.

Stopping the timer

M-x stop-twitching stops the timer.

Startup

The first time that you start twitching, it will first ask you to enter your Twitter consumer key and Twitter consumer secret. (See below for details on getting these.) After this, twitching will open up a browser window which will ask you to enter your username and password. Enter it and authorize your app. After this, you will be shown a 7 digit number on the browser. Enter this at the Emacs minibuffer and your tweets will get downloaded.

This will happen only the first time that twitching starts.

If you want to stop entering the consumer key and consumer secret each time that you start Emacs, you can add them to your start up script using the following commands

(setq *twitching-api-consumer-key* "YOUR CONSUMER KEY"
      *twitching-api-consumer-secret* "YOUR CONSUMER SECRET")

Navigation

You can go to the next tweet by using any of the following keys: C-n, n, down-arrow or j. To nagivate to the previous tweet, you can use any of the keys: C-p, p, up-arrow or k. These commands support prefix arguments, so C-u 5 j will move down five tweets.

To scroll down a page, you can use C-v, SPC or Page Down. You can scroll up a page using M-v, Backspace, or Page Up.

(Quick note: Emacs defines two commands scroll-up and scroll-down which do the exact inverse of what Page Up and Page Down do. For Emacs, the command scroll-up scrolls contents up but Page Up scrolls the cursor up. Here the terms "scroll up" and "scroll down", refer to the common meanings associated with Page Up and Page Down respectively.)

Difference with Twitter Web interface

In Twitter's web interface, newer tweets are shown above older ones. In twitching older tweets are shown first with new ones appended to the buffer.

Favoriting

Tweets can be favorited by typing s on a tweet. If a tweet is favorited, it will have a star shown next to it. If s is pressed on an already favorited tweet, twitching will unfavorite the tweet.

Favorited tweets

To view all your favorited tweets, use the command twitching-show-favorites. Upon invocation, your favorite tweets are downloaded and shown in the buffer *Favorite Tweets*. With a prefix argument, the command switches to the buffer immediately after it has been rendered.

Opening links, hashtags and mentions

Opening urls

To open a link on a tweet, move point to it and press o. If there are multiple links in a tweet they can be opened with a prefix argument. For instance, to open the 3rd link in a tweet, type C-u 3 o or, more simply, C-3 o.

To open all links in a tweet, simply type O. The links will open up in your default browser.

Opening hashtags

Opening hashtags work the same way as opening links. To open the first hashtag in a tweet, use the key binding # and to open the nth hashtag, use a prefix argument as C-u n #.

Opening user mentions

Opening user mentions work the same way as opening links. To open the first user mention in a tweet, use the key binding @ and to open the nth hashtag, use a prefix argument as C-u n @.

Getting a consumer-key and consumer-secret

To get your own consumer-key and consumer-secret, go to https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new and register a new application.

Select Application Type as Client and Default Access Type as Read & Write. Read only will also work but favoriting tweets will not be possible. Filtering, grouping and other features will work.

Why such an elaborate route?

If you write a Twitter client, you're expected to encode the consumer-key and consumer-secret within your application in such a way that your users do not have access to them. Obviously, this does not work well with Free Software programs.

Displaying User Profile images

To enable display of user profile pictures along with their tweets, add the following line to your .emacs file after the customizations mentioned in the section Usage.

(setq *twitching-profile-use-p* t)

Twitching will lazily download the user profile images and store them in your filesystem. So immediately after enabling this feature, your twitching buffer will still show your tweets without any profile images. The images will show up in time.

The profile images are stored in the directory specified by the variable *twitching-profile-directory*. By default, it evaluates to ~/.emacs.d/twitching/thumbnails.

Lack of image support in Windows

By default, Emacs does not ship with support for JPEG, PNG or GIF formats. See the answer to the question "3.3 How do I get image support?" in the Emacs FAQ for Windows.

To enable image support on Windows, I have found GnuWin32 useful. I downloaded the following packages

• GifLib - support for GIF files
• Jpeg - support for JPEG files
• LibPng - support for PNG files. This has a dependency on ZLib. The page has a link to its dependencies.

Extracted the contents of the above packages and place them in your EMACS_HOME/bin folder. The next time you start a new instance of Emacs, it should have support to display images.

To check if your Emacs supports images, you can run the following from Emacs. Type M-: and paste the following in the minibuffer (image-type-available-p 'jpeg). If you see a t printed, it means you have support to display JPEG files. The corresponding commands for GIF and PNG are (image-type-available-p 'gif) and (image-type-available-p 'png) respectively.

License

twitching is licensed under the terms of the GPLv3 (or later). This means you're free to use it for personal and commercial use, you're free to copy it and give copies away, and you're free to modify and redesign the source code, and to create derivative works. For details, read the contents of the file LICENSE distributed with twitching or visit http://www.gnu.org/license s/gpl-3.0.html.