blt shows you what your twitter friends are doing while you're working at the commandline, in Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Cygwin under Windows. In more detail, it's a perl script which integrates the checking of twitter into bash.
Think of it like biff for twitter. It should be considered pre-alpha at present. blt is released under the GPLv3 with no warranty.
Example:
marnanel@charcoal:~$ firefox &
[1] 6730
< wombats > deliriously happy
marnanel@charcoal:~$ blt @wombats: watch out for her siblings
marnanel@charcoal:~$
Installation:
Copy it to /usr/local/bin or similar. You will need the XML::LibXML and YAML libraries installed; they may already be installed on your system. There will be an installer one day. Let me know if you have problems.
Configuration:
blt is automatically set up based on questions it asks when you first run it, but you may set it up otherwise using the YAML file ~/.bltrc. It also attempts to add itself into your ~/.bashrc with the code PROMPT_COMMAND=path-to-blt. There is a rate limiter stopping blt checking twitter too often, which can be configured, but only by changing ~/.bltrc at present; it currently checks at most once every 60 seconds, although you should be aware that checking more than every 52 seconds on average is a TOS violation.
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