dragonminded/mastodon-vt100

A Mastodon client that displays on a VT-100 or compatible physical serial terminal.

mastodon-vt100

A Mastodon client that uses a VT-100 or compatible terminal to display. Assuming you have a VT-100 compatible terminal connected to your computer through a serial port, you can use this to interact with your home instance much the same way you would the web frontend or a mobile client.

What to Expect

Right now this is a fairly rudimentary client. The following features are present:

• Basic login/logout flow for your Mastodon-compatible instance.
• Home, local and public timelines, including rendering alt-text and CW text display toggling.
• Infinite scroll, where additional posts are fetched when you hit the bottom of a timeline.
• Composer box, supporting the ability to post with an optional CW and choosing the visibility.
• Individual post/thread view, supporting the ability to edit/delete your own posts, and ability to interact with other posts.
• Preference respecting for CW auto-expansion and composer default post visibility.

What doesn't work that I would like to get to at some point:

• Ability to like or boost a post from the focus view.
• Ability to bookmark a post from the focus view, ability to view bookmarked posts.
• User profile view with profile, pinned posts and user timeline display.
• Conversation/private messaging support.
• Additional formatting support for the post renderer.
• Asynchronous notifications using the terminal bell, notification viewer.

What I may get to at some point in the future:

• Ability to open hyperlinks in posts in focus view by proxying through elinks browser.
• Settings editor for your instance-wide settings.
• Muted/blocked words support in timeline and post views.
• Support for clicking on links to other instances in fake quote boosts.

Running This

If you are non-technical, or you just want to try it out without tinkering, I recommend using pipx to install the client. For help and instruction on setting up pipx on your computer, visit pipx's installation page. If you have pipx installed already, run the following line to install the mastodon-vt100 client on your computer.

pipx install git+https://github.com/DragonMinded/mastodon-vt100

Once that completes, you can run this client by typing the following line, substituting your instance:

mastodon-vt100 <your home instance here>

You can also run with --help, like the following example, to see all options:

mastodon-vt100 --help

Note that original VT-100 terminals, and variants such as the 101 and 102, need the XON/XOFF flow control option enabled. Make sure you enable flow control on the terminal itself, and then use the --flow argument to avoid overloading the terminal. Newer terminals such as mid-80s VT-100 clones often do not suffer from this problem and keep up just fine.

Happy posting!

Development

To get started, first install the requirements using a command similar to:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Then, you can run the application similar to:

python3 mastodon-vt100 <your home instance here>

You can also run with --help, like the following example, to see all options:

python3 mastodon-vt100 --help