I am definitely not a Twitter Power User however I do like following tweets from a small number of interesting people. On Windows, I spent some time finding a Twitter client that I liked using and eventually came across Digsby which suited me. Unfortunately Digsby was aquired by a rival in the recent past and it seems that almost all development ceased. The fact that Digsby continues to be widely used despite no real support is a credit to the original developers. Anyway, having settled on a client for Windows, the search began again for a Linux alternative that was similar to Digsby.
When I was playing with ZorinOS, I was experimenting with the default Twitter client “Gwibber” but I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get it to show/highlight unread tweets. I couldn’t find a Gwibber support forum and soon got fed up with the program.
I then came across an alternative to Gwibber called Choqok which looks great but is designed for the KDE desktop. It can be installed on other desktop environments however installation causes some KDE supporting libraries to be installed which otherwise might not be needed. Fortunately Linux doesn’t use a registry like Windows so I don’t have to worry about cluttering up the registry; something that can cause Windows to gradually slow down because registry searches slow down.
The extra KDE libraries do get loaded into memory when the Choqok program starts so you could argue that there is a performance impact however with the amount of RAM reasonably available now, it is not a major worry.
Anyway, if you are fed up with your Twitter client, I’d thoroughly recommend that you try Choqok.
so, what client did you end up with? your list is pretty much what i’m looking for, except that i’d love some keyboard shortcuts too. i’m currently with tweetdeck, but sometimes i get pissed about their MARK AS READ button, which is way too small for my taste.
I went for Choqok (which my best guess says the phonetic alphabet pronounces as “sh-rook”). I find it does just what I need and it is easy to see which are new “unread” tweets. I did look at tweetdeck but it seemed a bit OTT for my needs. I’d suggest trying Choqok and see what you think 🙂
Twhirl is nice; it allows you to have twitter, identi.ca and Friendfeed all up and running, but it requires you to run each as a seperate window. This is not cool (for me, anyway) because I use all three. Twhirl would be more usable for me if it was one window with tabs or if it aggregated all of the feeds together in one window, ala Gwibber.
Twhirl requires Adobe AIR which seems to have only partial support on Linux. When you say Twhirl is nice, have you used it on Linux?