keltia/forthlift

A command line app to post sequences of text lines on social media: prepare your sequence of status in your text editor, then post everything.

forthlift — post sequences of texts on social media

Forthlift is a command line application to post sequences of text lines on social media.

Its main use case is to post on Twitter several status that you have prepared first in your text editor.

It is thus designed to ease automation and integration in existing tools and had an Unix-like text-and-pipes command line interface.

For example, it makes it easy to post "chained" twitter status (that answer to each others) from your text editor. Just send the selected text to its standard input, selecting the twitter API, and voilà. Using Vim, you can tweet the visually-selected lines with: :'<,'>w !forthlift -a twitter

SYNOPSIS

forthlift [-h]

forthlift [-a {stdout,twitter}] [-m MAXLEN] [-i|-t] [-c] [-q] [-d] [-s]

DESCRIPTION

A generic tool

Generally speaking, it's a Unix-like command that operate a sequence of pre-programmed chained actions on its text input.

It comes with some existing actions:

• stdout: print the input text on the standard output,
• twitter: send the input text as status on twitter.

Features

The main feature of forthlift is its ability to chain actions. Depending on the chosen API, this could means different things:

• for twitter, this mean that the sequence of status will be posted as a sequence of answers and not as a list of independent tweets.

• for the "stdout" API, this means that each printed line will start with its index in the input list.

While it is recommended to prepare the input text with other text-processing tools (fold, fmt, tr, sed, grep, your text editor, etc.), forthlift comes with some rough text-processing capabilities, among which:

• ignore or trim lines that are longer than a given size (see --trim and --ignore),

• add a counter of the form <current index>/<total lines> at the end of the lines (see --counter).

OPTIONS

• -h, --help: show this help message and exit

• -a {stdout,twitter}, --api {stdout,twitter}: Name of the API to use. (default: stdout)

• -m MAXLEN, --max-len MAXLEN: Maximum number of characters in the lines. (default: 140)

• -i, --ignore: Ignore lines that are longer than MAXLEN (default: False)

• -t, --trim: Trim down lines that are longer than MAXLEN. (default: False)

• -c, --counter: Add a counter of the form " x/N" at the end of the lines, with N being the number of lines read and x the current index of the line. NOTE: this necessitate to read all the input before processing it. (default: False)

• -q, --quiet: Do not print errors and warnings on the standard error output. (default: False)

• -s, --setup: Setup the selected API (e.g. authenticate and get authorization to post). (default: False)

• -d, --independent: Post each item independently from the previous one The behaviour of this option depends on the selected API. For example on Twitter: do not post a line as an answer to the previous one but as a new tweet. (default: False)

INSTALLATION

Twitter

1. Copy twitter.conf-dist as twitter.conf and indicate your developer's API keys in the corresponding fields.
2. Run forthlift --api twitter --setup and follow the instructions (go to the given URL, then paste the given PIN).

Why should you get developer's API keys? Because Twitter does not like open-source desktop applications, see: http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/09/twitter-a-case-study-on-how-to-do-oauth-wrong/