TUT - A Mastodon Client for the terminal

I'm really skeptical about social media and avoid Facebook and Twitter like the plague. But a free, not commercially exploited communication platform like mastodon seems interesting, although I don't have much experience with it. So I thought I'll try it out.

@fab@pleroma.envs.net - My shiny new ActivityPub account

To my delight there are some CLI/Terminal clients for Mastodon. I tried 'toot', written in python but it gives me some strange "KeyError"s that may come from using pleroma as a server.

toot Github repository (www)

TUT

To my surprise tut is really feature complete and in my opinion easier to use, but I didn't use toot for long. Tut is written in go by Rasmus Lindroth.

TUT homepage (www)

TUT Github repository (www)

I use the 'tut-bin' package from the Arch User Repository (AUR) but there may be packages in other distributions.

I'm still figuring out how Mastodon works but after I settled in for some hours of playing around I really like the TUT interface. There are two main screen sections: The left column is for lists like timelines or threads and can be divided into panes. The right column is for the message view. There is a special editor screen when composing a message - You can use the builtin editor or use your all favorite (neovim).

Image of TUT interface

TUT key bindings

Navigating through lists can be done with the arrow keys or the vim-style h,j,k,l key bindings.

Global key bindings

The post related key bindings

If you are viewing a post in the view column you have the following keys:

When displaying a profile of a specific user there are these keys available:

The composer occupies the full screen and has these keybindings:

TUT commands

Commands can be entered by typing ':<command>'. These commands are available:

Configuration

I won't go into configuration details, but everything is configurable. You can choose the builtin text editor or your favorite one. Browser, image viewer, video- and audio-player can be defined as needed. I believe xdg-open is the default. All the keys can be customized and changed. TUT is also themeable so every color of every TUI element can be tailored to your needs. You can even create your theme interactively and import it to your configuration.

Create your own TUT theme (www)

Conclusion

As a newborn Mastodon user I'm completely satisfied. The pleroma web client is good for having an overview with all the media displayed in the timeline, but I won't need that very often. And as you see, TUT is nearly feature complete and you can view all the posted media in your favorite application.

If you play around for a few hours and got a little used to the interface you get a powerful tool to navigate through Mastodon/ActivityPub in the terminal. As a Social Media newbie I think this will be my client of choice now and in future.

All in all - have fun!

-fab-

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