Luna - Bluesky Client (Based on Cawbird 1.5)

Introduction

WIP

Shortcuts

Key	Description
Ctrl + t	Compose Tweet
Back	Go one page back (this can be triggered via the back button on the keyboard, the back thumb button on the mouse or Alt + Left)
Forward	Go one page forward (this can be triggered via the forward button on the keyboard, the forward thumb button on the mouse or Alt + Right)
Alt + num	Go to page num (between 1 and 7 at the moment)
Ctrl + Shift + s	Show/Hide topbar
Ctrl + p	Show account settings
Ctrl + k	Show account list
Ctrl + Shift + p	Show application settings

When a tweet is focused (via keynav):

• r - reply
• tt - retweet
• f - favorite
• q - quote
• dd - delete
• Return - Show tweet details
• k - Print tweet details to stdout (debug builds)

Compiling Cawbird

Preparation

Twitter clients need keys and secrets so that Twitter can go through the OAuth process. Cawbird used to ship with a standard set of but has always supported custom keys through schema settings. However, that wasn't convenient for software builds. Cawbird now supports:

a) per-user tokens and secrets (so each user uses a different "app")

b) configuration of the default token and secret at build time

What this means for developers is that you need to supply two build options with the key and the secret before the software will build. To stop them being trivially identifiable, we base64 encode them.

If you wish to build your own "micro-fork" of the application then register at developer.twitter.com and create an application. To base64 encode the keys you can run echo -n "<value>" | base64.

Reasons you may wish to micro-fork Cawbird:

• You want to package a modified version with your own patches (as IBBoard used to do with Corebird)
• You want to appear retro and use the old Corebird keys to confuse people
• You want to check whether you're getting hit by Twitter limiting applications (not just users - all users of the app in aggregate) to 100,000 calls to some endpoints (docs)

Alternatively you can continue using the default keys by using the values VmY5dG9yRFcyWk93MzJEZmhVdEk5Y3NMOA== and MThCRXIxbWRESDQ2Y0podzVtVU13SGUyVGlCRXhPb3BFRHhGYlB6ZkpybG5GdXZaSjI= respectively.

Compiling

Cawbird uses the Meson build system rather than the more archaic autoconf/make combination. Building is as simple as:

meson build -Dconsumer_key_base64=<your-base64-key> -Dconsumer_secret_base64=<your-base64-secret>
ninja -C build

If you want to test translations locally then you will also need to:

• pass -Dlocaltextdomain=true to meson
• run ninja -C build cawbird-gmo to generate the binary .mo translations
• run for file in po/*.gmo; do mkdir -p "${file/.gmo}/LC_MESSAGES/"; cp $file "${file/.gmo}/LC_MESSAGES/cawbird.mo"; done to put the .mo files in the expected places
• run pushd build; ./cawbird; popd to run Cawbird from the build directory
  • to test a different language, run cd build; LANGUAGE=aa_BB ./cawbird with the appropriate language code

Note that executing build/cawbird may result in one of the following errors:

Settings schema 'uk.co.ibboard.cawbird' is not installed

Settings schema 'uk.co.ibboard.cawbird' does not contain a key named 'foo'

To fix this, use the schemas from the build directory:

GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR=build/data/ GSETTINGS_BACKEND='memory' build/cawbird

Cawbird installs its application icon into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/, so an appropriate call to gtk-update-icon-cache might be needed.

Build Dependencies

• gtk+-3.0 >= 3.22
• glib-2.0 >= 2.44
• json-glib-1.0
• sqlite3
• libsoup-2.4
• librest-0.7
• liboauth
• gettext >= 0.19.7
• vala >= 0.28 (makedep)
• meson (makedep)
• gst-plugins-base-1.0 (for playbin, disable by passing -Dvideo=false to Meson)
• gst-plugins-bad-1.0 >= 1.6 or gst-plugins-good-1.0 (disable by passing -Dvideo=false to Meson, default enabled)
  • Requires the element-gtksink feature, provided by gstreamer1.0-gtk on Ubuntu-based systems, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-gtk on older RPM-based systems and gstreamer1-plugins-good-gtk on newer RPM-based systems
• gst-libav-1.0 (disable by passing -Dvideo=false to Meson, default enabled)
• gspell-1 >= 1.2 (for spellchecking, disable by passing -Dspellcheck=false to Meson, default enabled)

Note that the above packages are just rough estimations, the actual package names on your distribution may vary and may require additional repositories (e.g. RPMFusion in Fedora, or Packman in openSUSE)

If you pass -Dvideo=false to the Meson script, you don't need any gstreamer dependency but won't be able to view any videos.

Copyright

Cawbird is released under the GPL v3 (or later) - see COPYING for more details.

The video fallback image is a Creative Commons "CC-BY-3.0" licensed work by Iris Li.

Social Media

• @CawbirdClient on Twitter
• @Cawbird on Mastodon.social

Footnotes

1: home:IBBoard:desktop