twtplus – The missing Twitter command for Ubiquity and Firefox
Earlier this year I spent some time to write the “twtplus” command for Ubiquity, the intriguing Quicksilver-like plugin for Firefox. I’ve been tweaking it intermittently and now I’m gonna put together a little handy reference for it. Twtplus has the following features:
- Post message to your twitter account (of course)
- Preview your friends timeline. Click avatar to reply.
- @ and d message to friends with friends username autocompletion. Notice that “@” is a modifier keyword so you need to leave a space after it to get the friend name autocompletion working.
- Use “#url” tag to substitute the URL of the currently viewing page
- Automatically shorten all URLs found in a message using http://is.gd
- “as” modifier for posting as multiple twitter accounts.
Most of the features are pretty straightforward. Take a look at the following screenshot. Notice the grey hints after the “twtplus” command when you type and you’ll be fine.
twtplus
In order to get multi-account posting working, there are a couple things I’d like to mention. First, due to the way the browser works, if you have a logged in session for Twitter, the browser will ALWAYS post your tweet as the currently logged in user, regardless of the one you specifies with the “as” modifier keyword. Thus the solution is to avoid being logged in via the Twitter web interface, or when the stock “twitter” command prompts you a login dailog. If you visit twitter.com and find that you’ve already logged in, log out explicitly.
Secondly, twtplus looks for your stored usernames and passwords for Twitter in your Firefox password manager, for the login authentication to Twitter and provide multiple account autocompletion suggestions. So you need to store your Twitter accounts with Firefox if you haven’t already. This is also a more secure and convenient way than the stock “twitter” command since you don’t need to input your twitter login from time to time.
Update: Here’s an awesome screencast from @neo4zion
