Tyler Karaszewski

Sparrow

Sparrow is a command-line twitter client, intended for use on modern, color, unicode-capable terminal emulators. Specifically, I've designed it to work in the OS X terminal, and the Gnome terminal included with Ubuntu Linux.

Prerequisites

  1. Perl 5.8 or better. This comes with my target OS distributions, and most other unix-like OSes.
  2. A variety of Perl modules. Most of these come with most Perl distributions. The ones you're most likely to be missing are JSON, Curses, and LWP::UserAgent, in decreasing likeliness of your lacking them. If you get a warning when trying to run sparrow and being unable to find some module, you can attempt installing it with the following commands: 
    sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell
[your password]
install JSON
exit
    This will start up Perl's CPAN module where you can install modules. Note that if JSON isn't the module you were missing, try substituting Curses, or LWP::UserAgent, or whatever else was missing into the above command.

Note: you want a Curses module that was built against a ncurses library with wide character support. On ubuntu, this means you should install libncursesw5 and libncursesw5-dev before installing the Curses perl module.

Using Sparrow

To start Sparrow, simply run it from the command line to see the help screen.

./sparrow

This will instruct you to run it again with a '--username' parameter to log in to twitter.

./sparrow --username=yourname

While running Sparrow, you can press 'h' to see the help screen again.

Download

The currently available version is Sparrow 2009-10-31.

Screenshots

Here's Sparrow running on an Ubuntu Karmic Koala machine.

 

Feedback

Feedback, including bug reports, should be swent to me via the 'Contact Me' link in the menu on this page. If you're reporting a problem, please be as detailed as possible in describing the problem, how I can cause the same problem to occur, and what your operating environment is like.