toot

I currently have 56 tabs open in Firefox and Pinafore kept getting lost in between these tabs. As much as I like Pinafore, once in a while, the lack of a dedicated app on the desktop triggers my itch for a standalone mastodon client. And a while ago I scratched that itch. One duckduckgo search later, I was looking at the reddit page where the CLI app “toot” was mentioned. I couldn’t find it in the ubuntu repository (toot is available from Ubuntu 19.04 onwards and elementary is still on 18.04) but elementary suggested it might be available as a snap package and so I grabbed it from the Snap repository. First impression: I like it. Sure, it takes few keystrokes which I don’t mind. It’s very minimal though - the app name choice itself is an exercise in keeping things simple. I immediately fired a toot from “toot” on how I felt about it.

But honestly, I can check and post toots faster on the terminal than the browser. Add multiple panels for notifications, private messages and different timelines and I would be a full time convert. So far all other mastodon apps on Linux sucks. Here’s a short review of each one of them.

• Tootle - abandoned
• Olifant - Tootle clone. Memory hog.
• Whalebird - Electron app. Meh.
• Hyperspace - Not bad but could use space more effectively.
• TheDesk - 🤮️
• Cuckoo+ - It doesn’t update my timeline.
• Halcyon - Tries to look like twitter. 👎️
• Pinafore- Prettier than anything above. Clean and minimalistic.

In a sea of mediocrity, toot terminal app is refreshing. What I would like to see in future updates is the ability to change themes like tuir, automatic timeline refresh and multiple panels. That would be dope!

Day 24 - Join Me in #100DaysToOffload