🐦 Integrate Bird CLI into FeedTUI for Interactive Twitter/X Widget

[muk2]

Summary

Integrate Bird CLI into the FeedTUI Ratatui dashboard to provide a fully interactive Twitter/X experience directly inside the terminal.

The goal is to embed a polished, responsive Twitter/X widget that allows users to:
• Tweet
• Reply
• Read posts
• View threads
• Search
• View mentions

All functionality should feel native to FeedTUI — not just a subprocess dump of CLI output.

⸻

Background

Bird CLI (installed via bun) allows interacting with Twitter/X via terminal when provided:
• CT0
• AUTH_TOKEN

These must be supplied as environment variables (extracted from browser cookies).

Example commands supported by Bird:

bird tweet "ship it"

bird reply https://x.com/user/status/1234567890123456789 "same"

bird read https://x.com/user/status/1234567890123456789

bird thread 1234567890123456789

bird search "from:steipete" -n 5

bird mentions -n 5

FeedTUI should integrate with Bird programmatically and render results inside Ratatui widgets.

⸻

Goals

Create a dedicated Twitter/X tab inside FeedTUI that:
• Executes Bird commands internally
• Renders structured output in a clean Ratatui layout
• Supports keyboard-driven interaction
• Remains fully non-blocking and responsive

⸻

Required Features

1️⃣ Tweet Composer
• Keybinding (e.g. t) opens compose modal
• User enters tweet text
• Executes:

bird tweet "<text>"

•	Display confirmation or error feedback

⸻

2️⃣ Reply Support
• Select tweet → press r
• Open reply modal
• Execute:

bird reply <url> "<text>"

Show success/failure message

⸻

3️⃣ Read & Thread Viewer
• View individual tweet:

bird read <url>

•	View thread:

bird thread <tweet_id>

Render thread in scrollable panel
•	Support ↑ ↓ PgUp PgDn navigation

⸻

4️⃣ Search Support
• Open search modal (e.g. /)
• Execute:

bird search "<query>" -n <count>

Default to -n 5
• Render results in selectable list
• Press Enter to open selected tweet in detail view

Example:

bird search "from:steipete" -n 5

5️⃣ Mentions View
• Keybinding (e.g. m) loads mentions
• Execute:

bird mentions -n 5

Display scrollable list of recent mentions
• Highlight new or unread mentions
• Allow opening selected mention in detail panel

⸻

UI / UX Requirements
• Clean Ratatui layout:
• Timeline/Search/Mentions list panel
• Detail view panel
• Modal overlay for compose/reply/search
• Non-blocking subprocess execution
• Loading indicator while Bird runs
• Proper error display:
• Missing auth variables
• Bird not installed
• Network failures

⸻

Technical Requirements
• Use async subprocess handling (avoid UI freezing)
• Capture stdout/stderr cleanly
• Parse Bird output for structured rendering (if JSON available)
• Abstract Bird integration behind a trait:

trait TwitterProvider {
    fn tweet(...)
    fn reply(...)
    fn read(...)
    fn thread(...)
    fn search(...)
    fn mentions(...)
}

This allows replacing Bird in the future without major refactor.

⸻

Environment Requirements
• Bird CLI installed and accessible in $PATH
• CT0 and AUTH_TOKEN provided via environment variables
• Fail gracefully if missing

⸻

Out of Scope
• Direct Twitter/X API integration
• OAuth implementation inside FeedTUI
• Media uploads
• Multi-account support (future enhancement)