forthlift — post sequences of texts on social media

Forthlift's primary use case is a command line application to post sequences of text items on social media. You first prepare your thread in your text editor, then call forthlift, and everything is posted at once.

As side effect, fothlift became a more generic tool, that can process text streams, format them, assemble their atomic units in anothers, and then send them elsewhere. It is thus designed to ease automation and integration with existing tools, and has an Unix-like text-and-pipes philosophy.

Examples

Select in Vim, post on Mastodon

Forthlift makes it easy to post "chained" Mastodon toots (that answer to each others) from your text editor. Just send the selected text to its standard input, selecting the twitter API, and voilà.

Using Vim, you can toot the visually-selected lines (each line making a toot) with:

:'<,'>w !forthlift --lift mastodon

Prepare toots in a file, post on Mastodon

Let's say that you prepared a text file of the form:

This is a multi-lines...

... toot!
--
And here is an answeer to the previous toot.
(With two lines as well.)
--
And a final toot.

You would want the toots to show a counter, managing the expectations of your reader.

You can post it right away with:

cat my_file.txt | forthlift --consume "sections:--,skip" --format counter -l mastodon

Manage long threads from Markdown

Let's say you want to post the sections of this README as a sequence of toots, with a hashtag that indicates it's gona be long. And you would want to double-check what it would do first. You can send the items on the standard output, like:

forthlift -s filename:README.md -c sections -f suffix:#longThread -f panel -l stdout

Full-featured file-to-Mastodon pipeline

# Define a shortcut
mastopost() { forthlift -s "filename:$1" -c sections:^#,skip -f skip -f counter -f suffix:#longThread -l mastodon; }
# Call it with:
mastopost my_file.txt

DESCRIPTION

A generic tool

Generally speaking, Forthlift is a Unix-like command that operate a sequence of pre-programmed chained actions on its text input.

Forthlift has four action operators classes, one for each step of the processing:

1. stream, indicating from where to get the input data.
2. consume, telling how to parse the data from the input stream.
3. format, for manipulating the content itself.
4. lift, defining where to send the final items.

Only one consume operator can be passed, but any number of stream, format, and lift operators can be combined. To apply several operators of the same class, the user must pass the same flag several time. For instance:

# Applies strip, then skip, then counter on the consumed lines.
forthlift --format strip --format skip --format counter

Most of the time, the order of the operators matters.

SYNOPSIS

{{FORTHLIFT_HELP}}