Identi.ca is a free software microblogging service, similar to Twitter, based on the Status.net code base. I recently needed to update my status from Emacs, since its faster for me and easier. I’ve been using an an Emacs mode to update my Twitter account, but there was nothing to use for my Identi.ca account. And seeing there’s a Vim plugin, I thought someone, like me, needed an Emacs mode too.

So I forked the original twittering-mode to use it with the Identi.ca platform, using its Twitter compatible api.

System Requirements

• GNU Emacs 22 or later
• Linux, Mac OS X, BSD or any Unix based OS (requires wget)

Download

Download the latest stable release of Emacs Identica-mode

Or get the latest development code from the Git repository at
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/identica-mode.git

Installation

Copy the identica-mode.el file to your Emacs elisp files directory (.emacs.d/ in Ubuntu) Then add the following to your .emacs (or your preferred customizations file)

;;; Identi.ca mode
(require 'identica-mode)
(setq identica-username "yourusername")

If you want to authenticate using simple authentication, create a file ~/.authinfo with the following contents:

machine servername login yourusername password yourpassword

Replace servername with your server (if connecting to Identica service, use identi.ca as server name), yourusername and yourpassword with your information.

You can also authenticate using OAuth, specially if you log in with an OpenID account which has no password. To use OAuth authentication (requires using oauth.el), add the following to your .emacs file:

(setq identica-auth-mode "oauth")

If you want to post from the minibufer without having identica buffer active, add the following global keybinding. Add this to send status updates

(global-set-key "\C-cip" 'identica-update-status-interactive)

(global-set-key "\C-cid" 'identica-direct-message-interactive)

Use

To start identica mode type:

M-x identica-mode

Press the “i” key to toggle icon mode to see user pictures.

To view your replies timeline

C-c C-r

C-c C-a

C-c C-f

C-c C-u

C-c C-g

C-c C-t

To refresh the buffer’s timeline press “g”.

To post an update of your status, press

C-c C-s

To send a direct message to a user, press

C-c C-d

To repeat (re-dent) a message, press

C-c RET

To favor a message, press the “F” key (shift f) while the cursor is on the message’s line.

Additionally, you while typing your message you can press <F4> key while the cursor is over a URL to shorten it using any of the following URL shortening services: Ur1.ca, TightURL, Goo.gl, TinyURL, To.ly and Is.gd. To expand an short url in your timeline, position your cursor over the short url and press ‘e’ key, it will be replaced with the expanded version in a few seconds.

Hope it can be of use for anyone using Emacs for almost everything, like I try to do, and would like to hear some feedback.

Contribute

If you have any ideas for features, patches or bug fixes, please add them to the identica-mode bug tracking list.

You can also help out if you’ve liked Emacs identica-mode and have some spare change. It would be great to support this project by making any kind of donation on the “tip jar” in appreciation of the hours invested on its development and improvement.