a twtxt client (http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=44358.0)


twtxtc: A twtxt client in C.

What is twtxt?

twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist approach to micro-blogging, similar to Twitter but with self-hosted plaintext files. See the original twtxt documentation for details. twtxtc is a twtxt client written in the C language.


Build or download an appropriate curl binary for your system and place it into your $PATH or the twtxtc folder. If you don't, you won't be able to retrieve your timeline. Sorry.


./twtxtc [COMMAND]


tweet <text>            Adds <text> to your twtxt timeline.
timeline                Displays your twtxt timeline.
following               Gives you a list of all people you follow.
follow <user> <URL>     Adds the twtxt file from <URL> to your timeline.
                        <user> defines the user name to display.
unfollow <user>         Removes the user with the display name <user> from your timeline.
help                    Displays a help screen.


Install Conan, then use cmake to build twtxtc:

% cd path/to/source
% mkdir build ; cd build
% cmake .. ; cmake build .

This should be all.

Compiler flags

For lazyness reasons, twtxtc only uses colors in the most prominent place, namely in the timeline: By default you will get an adequate combination of yellow and white in the list. If you don't want to have such nice colors because you prefer boring plain text (and/or you want to process the output automatically), you can use the NO_COLORS compiler flag to disable them.


If found, twtxtc will use the .twtxtconfig file inside your HOME directory. (See twtxtc help for information on where it should be found.) The .twtxtconfig file is meant to be a valid JSON file like this:

    "nickname": "your nickname",
    "twtxtfile": "twtxt.txt",
    "maxlog": 100,
    "spacing": "   ",
    "following": {
        "user_1": "https://example.com/twtxt.txt",
        "user_2": "https://elsewhere.com/tweets.txt"

Possible entries are:

  • nickname: Your preferred nickname. Only used to filter mentions to other people.
  • twtxtfile: The location of your twtxt.txt file. Defaults to ./twtxt.txt.
  • maxlog: The maximum number of entries shown when you view your timeline. Defaults to 100.
  • spacing: A string value that contains the spacing between the user name and the text when viewing your timeline. Defaults to three spaces.
  • following: A list of users you follow. Can be managed with the follow and unfollow commands.

The current limit of the list of users you are following is at 4 KiB. You probably won't reach that limit any time soon.


  • I'd really like to have Unicode support in twtxtc.
  • Mentions could be made more obvious, e.g. bold formatting or so.


twtxtc is licensed under the terms of the CDDL license. It uses the lovely cJSON library for certain functionalities, basically following the terms of the MIT license. Please read the particular LICENSE documents and/or the header files in case you are interested.