man TweetShell: A Browser-Based Terminal For Twitter

If you’ve ever spent much time working from the command line, there’s a good chance you’re going to love TweetShell, a new Twitter client that replicates the terminal environment in the browser. No, it isn’t very user-friendly — if you’ve never heard of commands like ls or man you’re going to be totally lost here, but if you can hold your own in a Bash shell you’re going to be right at home. (Note: while the site is called TweetShell, the URL is Tweetsh.com.

To get started, it’s probably a good idea to run the man command to get a list of the site’s main features. TweetShell just launched a few hours ago so it’s buggy and is missing some common Twitter functionality, but it has most of the basics: you can login using either OAuth or the ‘old’ less secure way, you can tweet from your account using the wall command, and you can browse through tweets from other users using the directory commands like cd and ls. There are also a number of more advanced commands, though frankly I haven’t been able to figure out how some of them work (feel free to leave tips in the comments).

Of course, there are already a number of Twitter clients that actually run from the terminal, but this runs from the browser, which means it’s more accessible for casual use and you can access it from any computer.

Thanks to Habib Haddad for the tip.

Update: Here’s another nifty Twitter web console that’s worth checking out if you like TweetShell.