I have been a solid user of TTYtter for a couple of years now, much preferring the speed and power of a command line Twitter client. And, after having tried–at one time or another–most of the Linux or cross-platform Twitter clients, I can safely say that for me TTYtter is easily the best.

There is, however, a new ncurses client that is showing a lot of promise: Tyrs. Only at the 0.2.1.1 stage, and with a fraction of the functionality that TTYtter has, it is nevertheless a very nice client.

Requiring little in the way of dependencies, only python-twitter and python-oauth2, both available in the AUR or in the debian/Ubuntu repos (if you are using debian/Ubuntu, you will need the newer python-twitter-0.8.2 for it to run).

Tyrs is easy to configure, with good documentation and a simple configuration file, located by default at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tyrs/tyrs.cfg. The default keybinds are Vim-centric, naturally…

My config is pretty straightforward at this point:

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[keys]
retweet           = p
retweet_and_edit  = P
mentions          = a
reply             = r

[colors]
highlight         = 1
header            = 6
hashtag           = 4
attag             = 2
text              = 7
warning_msg       = 1
info_msg          = 2

[params]
refresh           = 1
tweet_border      = 0

Written in Python, the code is well commented and relatively easy to find your way around if your are keen on hacking.

The developer, Nicolas Paris, is both approachable and helpful and is actively developing Tyrs. With some more functionality in the pipeline, it looks to be a very nice application.