How to create a Twitter list using the command line Twitter client, t, on Windows.

Hashtags are nice, but I wanted to be able to dynamically create and delete Twitter lists as well & I found the t Ruby client which allowed me to do this. Here’s how to get it going from a blank slate.

First, install Ruby with RubyInstaller. You’ll also need the DevKit.
Install the Ruby gem with gem install t. Then, register a application with Twitter. Next, authenticate the client with t authorize, which should take you to Twitter and ask you if you want to let the app you created access your account. You might have some issues with silly stuff getting the authentication to work, like outdated keys or whatever.

Then once you get to where you can tweet from your account, you’re ready to go. Create a new list with t list create [name of list]. The neat thing about having a command line client is that all the pipes and redirects and stuff work, so you can do cat listofhandles.txt | xargs t list add [nameoflist]. I think you have to have cygwin installed for xargs and cat to work, but I guess you could just do a batch file with a loop if you didn’t care about looking cool.

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