Since I run irssi all the time, packing as many features into it as possible seems like a nice idea.
So I use bitlbee to connect to Messenger, Google Talk/Jabber and ICQ and I have been using tircd (Twitter/irc gateway) and tweet.im (Twitter/Google Talk gateway) to connect to Twitter; but none of them works like I want them to.
Today I stumbled across Twirssi, a script for irssi to interact with Twitter.
Out of the box twirssi expects input to be UTF-8 which caused some grief because my terminal is ISO-8859-15.
First, lets install required modules for twirssi
I run Ubuntu Karmic Koala so Net::Twitter
is available as a package
$ sudo apt-get install libnet-twitter-perl
If you run an older Ubuntu release or another Linux/Unix variant that does not have a native package, install it from CPAN (I will not go into the configuration of CPAN here – have a look at this article for more information).
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install Net::Twitter
Answer yes to all dependencies.
Next step is to install a Perl module for the URL shortening service you wish to use; I use Bit.ly so let’s install the module
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install WWW::Shorten::Bitly
Now, let’s install twirssi
Head to irssi’s scripts directory
$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts
Download the script
$ wget http://twirssi.com/twirssi.pl
Make sure the script is autoloaded at startup
$ cd autorun
$ ln -sf ../twirssi.pl .
Patch twirssi to support other charsets than UTF-8
$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts
$ wget http://people.freebsd.org/~garga/patches/twirssi_charset.diff
$ patch -p1 < twirssi_charset.diff
Finally, configure twirssi
The configuration is done from inside irssi
- Create a new window for twirssi:
/win new hidden
- Name the new window:
/win name twitter
- Optional; Move the new window to another location:
/win move <number>
- Optional; Save new window layout:
/layout save
- Load twirssi:
/script load twirssi.pl
- Configure URL shortening service:
/set short_url_provider Bitly
and/set short_url_args "Bitly API key"
- Configure Twitter usename:
/set twitter_usernames Your_Twitter_Username
and/set twitter_passwords Your_Twitter_Password
(Note: This will store your Twitter password in clear text in irssi’s configuration) - Set charset to use
/set twirssi_charset ISO-8859-15
- Reload the script to pickup autologin to Twitter:
/script load twirssi.pl
More information on how to use twirssi is available here