.. _intro:

Introduction
============

**twtxt** is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

You want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

**tl;dr**: twtxt is a CLI tool, as well as a format specification for self-hosted flat file based microblogging.

Demonstration
-------------

|demo|

.. |demo| image:: https://asciinema.org/a/1w2q3suhgrzh2hgltddvk9ot4.png
    :target: https://asciinema.org/a/1w2q3suhgrzh2hgltddvk9ot4
    :alt: Demo

Features
--------
- A beautiful command-line interface thanks to click.
- Asynchronous HTTP requests thanks to asyncio/aiohttp and Python 3.
- Integrates well with existing tools (scp, cut, echo, date, etc.) and your shell.
- Don’t like the official client? Tweet using ``echo -e "`date -Im`\tHello world!" >> twtxt.txt``!