Linux Twitter Clients

I’ve been having pretty bad luck finding one that works for multiple accounts. I installed Choqok a few days ago, and was pretty happy with it until it broke today. When I launch it, it immediately sucks up about half the CPU, but doesn’t actually start, and leaves a pretty picture in the middle of the screen, independent of what application I’m using. I have to kill it to shut it down. Googling around, I’ve found this to be an issue if you have a lot of unread tweets, but since I can’t functionally start it, there’s no way to read them and fix it.

So then I tried Qwit, which installed fine, and went to Twitter to authenticate my three accounts, and said they’d been approved. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t either display or send tweets for any of them. Other than that, it’s awesome.

I’ve also tried Gwibber, which runs fine, except when I go to the Edit/Accounts menu, it does nothing.

So I’m back to using two different browsers (Firefox and Midori) for two of my accounts, and not doing anything with the third one (which is my book account). I’d like to solve this before the book is available, though, which is likely to be next week.

[Thursday-morning update]

OK, the solution I’ve found that seems to be working pretty well is the Tweetdeck app for Google Chrome. There may be one for Firefox, too, but I’ll stick with Chrome as long as it doesn’t act up.

[Bumped]

13 thoughts on “Linux Twitter Clients”

  1. I thought that the new and improved version of Private Browsing (FF v.20 and higher) within FireFox was supposed to allow for separate accounts on the same website in separate windows (and maybe even in separate tabs on the same window)? If not, launching separate instances of FireFox with different profiles should accomplish a similar task inasmuch as you would be able to log in to three different accounts in three different windows all at the same time and not worry about cross-window login interference.

    Not sure how close the Linux version is to the rest of the versions of Firefox, though, and I’ve never tried the new Private Browsing, either.

  2. Oh, and speaking of sucking CPU cycles, I think that the new “Share Bar” on each post is slowing down loading of the website by about 90%. At least, that’s the one thing that I’ve noticed is new since the website started to slow down SIGNIFICANTLY in the last 36 hours or so.

  3. I used to use Gwibber, but it seems to have stopped working or been removed from the Mint repos. I’ve been trying to find a replacement myself, there’s the ‘friends-app’ program which seems to do something similar, but it tells me to set up an account in the system settings, which doesn’t exist.

    I’m guessing Ubuntu broke everything when trying to switch to a phone interface.

  4. I don’t have a twitter account to use with it, but it looks like mozilla thunderbird supports twitter.

  5. Looking on synaptic, there’s something called ‘hotot’ available in gtk and qt versions. Also some of the irc/chat clients also seem to support twitter, in particular pidgin and smuxi.

    (Also: turpial, written in python, and a couple of shell-based twitter clients: ttytter and twidge. There’s also an emacs plugin called twittering-mode, and a unity plugin.)

  6. It looks like twitter upgraded their API in June, from 1.0. You may want to look for something stating it is 1.1 compliant.

  7. As I use neither twitter nor (desktop) Linux, I can offer only sympathy.

    And, well, the not-quite-schadenfreude of knowing I’m not in that pit.

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