In the next article we are going to take a look at Rainbow Stream. Today there are many Twitter clients available for Ubuntu, but if you are one of those who prefers use a CLI to view and share tweets from Ubuntu, continue reading the following lines.
As I say, if you are a user who likes to use the terminal, you will not want to leave the comfort of it and go to another place to do everything that Twitter allows you to do. Using the terminal makes certain tasks more efficient and even faster than using a graphical interface. This is so because command line tools don't use too many resources, which makes them a great alternative to graphics applications, especially if you use older hardware.
Next we will see how any user can tweet directly from the command line from Ubuntu through the Rainbow Stream app. In order to carry out the entire process, we will see how to install the application giving it access to use our Twitter account, and end up tweeting through it. Everything we are going to see, I have tested on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system.
Rainbow Stream Installation
This is one Python-based open source application. We can install it in Ubuntu through the Python Pip3 package installer. To proceed with its installation we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the following command in it to install pip3, if your system does not already have it installed:
sudo apt install python3-pip
The software will be installed on the system. Now we can install Rainbow Stream package via pip3:
sudo pip3 install rainbowstream
You may also need to install some more packages to get the Rainbow Stream utility to work fine in your system. These additional libraries can be installed using the command:
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev libjpeg-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev
After this, everything will be ready for use the Rainbow Stream CLI.
Start Rainbow Stream and Tweet
Launching and using Rainbow Stream is pretty simple. We will only have to execute the following command to start the Rainbow Stream CLI:
rainbowstream
Rainbow Stream will need permission to access Twitter in order for us to use this client. The app now requires a PIN. To obtain it we need log in to Twitter through the following web page that will automatically open in our web browser default when we start Rainbow Stream:
Enter your email / Twitter username and password. Then click on the button «authorize app«. Once the account information is verified, the Twitter API will generate a PIN through which we will be granted access via Rainbow Stream.
After this, we will only have to write this PIN in Rainbow Stream so that the authorization process is completed and we get to the next CLI:
Manage Tweets with Rainbow Stream
Writes "h”And then press the key Intro. This we will show help about everything we can do.
For example, if we want see help in tweets, we will use the following command:
h tweets
Next we are going to see some of the most common things that we can do through this CLI:
If we write 'me'and click Intro, We see our own Tweets.
If we want view a specific number of Tweets, we will only have to write:
me [número]
Writes "home”And press Intro for see our TimeLine. We can also specify the number of Tweets we want Rainbow Stream to show us typing:
home [número]
If we want tweet from Terminal, we will not have more to write t [tweet text] and then press Intro to tweet directly.
After this, we can check that the tweet has been published correctly.
All tweets that are listed through this utility come with an ID. We will be able use the ID of one of your tweets to delete it using the following command:
del [ID]
If you would like to exit application, you can do it using the shortcut Ctrl + C.
uninstall
To remove the utility, you can do so by running the following command in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):
sudo pip3 uninstall rainbowstream
To get more information about this utility and its use, users can consult the project GitHub page or the official documentation.