Bird

bird

Use bird to read/search X and post tweets/replies.

Authentication

Requires AUTH_TOKEN and CT0 environment variables (X session cookies). Credentials sourced from ~/.config/bird/credentials.env. Run bird check to verify credentials before any operation.

Quick start

• bird whoami — show authenticated account
• bird check — verify credential availability
• bird read <url-or-id> — read a tweet
• bird thread <url-or-id> — full conversation thread
• bird search "query" -n 5 — search tweets
• bird mentions -n 10 — recent mentions
• bird home -n 10 — home timeline
• bird user-tweets <handle> -n 5 — tweets from a user
• bird about <username> — account info and location
• bird news — trending topics

Posting (ALWAYS confirm with user first)

• bird tweet "text" — post a new tweet
• bird reply <id-or-url> "text" — reply to a tweet
• bird --media <path> tweet "text" — tweet with image (up to 4)

Reading with JSON output

Add --json to any read command for structured output:

• bird read <url> --json
• bird search "query" -n 5 --json

Tips

• Use --plain flag for clean output without emoji/color
• Use --quote-depth 0 to skip quoted tweet expansion
• Tweet IDs and URLs are interchangeable in all commands
• bird <tweet-id-or-url> is a shorthand for bird read
• Cookies expire periodically — refresh from browser DevTools (F12 → Application → Cookies → x.com)