Twirssi is a Twitter/identi.ca plugin for irssi. Installation is pretty simple, but I've put a Gentoo package in my overlay in case you're picky about one-off installations or don't want to track down all those dependencies by hand.

Usage is also nice and simple. Here's an extract of the full docs:

  • Load the script: /script load twirssi.pl
  • Log in to twitter: /twitter_login <username>
  • Post: /tweet <status>
  • Follow: /twitter_follow [-w] <username> (with -w, send their tweets to a window of the same name)
  • Unfollow: /twitter_unfollow <username>
  • Search: /twitter_search <keyword>
  • Subscribe: /twitter_subscribe [-w] <keyword> (-w same as for /twitter_follow)
  • Unsubscribe: /twitter_unsubscribe <keyword>

Subscriptions are basically repeated searches. For example, if you wanted continuous updates on posts about twirssi, you would use:

/twitter_subscribe #twirssi

Twirssi saves your current settings (follows, subscriptions, window names, etc.) in ~/.irssi/scripts/twirssi.*.

You can direct a public tweet towards a user by including @<username> in your tweet text. You can also tag the tweet so that others can search for it with #keyword.

There is currently no way to list users that you are following (a.k.a. your friends) or your followers. Here's an excerpt from #twirssi on irc.foonetic.net.

--- Log opened Mon Feb 20 10:13:06 2012
10:13 < wking> is there a way to list users you are following (aka friends?) in twirssi?
10:15 <&Gedge> oh, just replied to your(?) tweet
10:16 < wking> ah, thanks.  Sorry for reposting ;)
10:17 <&Gedge> Not really (/twirssi_dump is debugging so doesn't count). Perhaps #twirssi needs "/twitter_friends" to list friends.