How to Tweet From The Terminal

Tutorial Dec 23, 2020

Rainbow Stream is a terminal-based Twitter client. It's powerful and looks beautiful in the terminal. Along with simple features we would expect, like being able to tweet, retweet and message people, Rainbow Stream also provides a realtime tweet-stream. And all inside the terminal.

This tutorial is a guide on how to use Twitter from the terminal, with Rainbow Stream.

INSTALL RAINBOW STREAM

You will need to have python and pip available to Install rainbowstream.

Python 2.x

pip install rainbowstream

Python 3.x

pip3 install rainbowstream

AUTHORIZE RAINBOW STREAM

We need to do a one-time authorization of our Rainbow Stream client with our Twitter account. Run the rainbowstream command and wait a few seconds. The authorization link will open up in your default browser. If it did not, the link will be available in the terminal output for you to copy-paste into the address bar of a browser of your choice.

While in the browser Twitter will give you a PIN, use it on the terminal to finish the authorization process.

rainbowstream

You are running latest version (1.5.2)

Hi there! We're gonna get you all set up to use Rainbow Stream.
Opening: https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=3ibp6gAAAAAAXZ0wAAABdqm7VAA


In the web browser window that opens please choose to Allow
access. Copy the PIN number that appears on the next page and paste or
type it here:
    
Please enter the PIN: 8966940

Once the authorization process is complete, you will be greeted with a prompt with your Twitter tag in it, as shown below. Rainbow Stream is all ready to start accepting commands.

You will start to see your Twitter timeline scrolling by. For exiting the rainbowstream client, just type in "q" and press Enter

After this point, you can run the command rainbowstream anytime to access your Twitter account from the terminal.

USING RAINBOW STREAM

Before we start tweeting, some important commands to know are,

"h" to get help with commands
"p" to pause the stream
"r" to resume/unpause the stream
"c" to clear the screen
"q" to quit the rainbow stream client

There are a lot of commands available in Rainbow Stream. Only a very few of them will be shown here. The help (h) command can help you to get familiar with the other commands, make sure to read it.

1. TWEET

The t command is used to make a tweet. The words that follow the command will be tweeted out.

t hello from rainbowstream

  MyName @mytwittertag 10 seconds ago 
  ♺:0 ♥:0 id:10 via Rainbow Stream 
  hello from rainbowstream

2. RETWEET

The rt command is used for retweeting tweets. Every tweet that you will see in Rainbow Stream will have an id along with it. rt 12 will retweet the tweet with id 12.

rt 12

3. MESSAGE

The mes command can be used to message someone. To send "hi there" to @someone,

mes @someone hi there

3. WHOIS

To see the profile information of someone, use the whois command.

whois @ukiatsuya

  宇木敦哉 @ukiatsuya : 111 tweets  0 following  34069 followers
    Cencoroll Director
    たぶん絵置き場です。たまに宣伝も。
    Instagram : https://t.co/XcJYRXPL46
    Location : Sapporo
    URL : https://t.co/LDndfduUQQ
    Joined 10 years ago

IMAGES

You might think that you will have to give up on images and pictures to use Rainbow Stream. Luckily, we don't have to, at least not entirely. The Rainbow Stream client is capable of rendering images as coloured ASCII arts. This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, run the following config command.