twtxt file

The central component of sharing information, i.e. status updates, with twtxt is a simple text file containing all the status updates of a single user. This file is often referred as the feed of an user. The location of the twtxt file is configured in the twtxt section in the configuration file. See Configuration.

Format specification

The twtxt file contains one status per line, each of which is equipped with an RFC 3339 date-time string (with or without UTC offset) followed by a TAB character (\t) to separate it from the actual text. A specific ordering of the statuses is not mandatory.

The file must be encoded with UTF-8 and must use LF (\n) as line separators.

A status should consist of up to 140 characters, longer status updates are technically possible but discouraged. twtxt will warn the user if a newly composed status update exceeds this limit, and it will also shorten incoming status updates by default. Also note that a status may not contain any control characters.

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @<source.nick source.url> or @<source.url> format and should be expanded by the client, when rendering the tweets. The source.url is available to provide a way to discover new twtxt.txt files and distinguish between multiple users using the same nickname locally. The source.url can be interpreted as a TWTXT URI.

Take a look at this example file:

2016-02-04T13:30:00+01:00   You can really go crazy here! ┐(゚∀゚)┌
2016-02-03T23:05:00+01:00   @<example http://example.org/twtxt.txt> welcome to twtxt!
2016-02-01T11:00:00+01:00   This is just another example.
2015-12-12T12:00:00+01:00   Fiat lux!