About two months ago I wrote about my then views on the Corebird Twitter client. In that entry I said that Corebird was a great client for checking in on Twitter and skimming through it, but wasn't my preference for actively following Twitter; for that I still wanted Choqok for various reasons. You know what? It turns out that I was wrong. I now feel that Corebird is both a better Linux Twitter client in general and that it's a better Twitter client for me in specific. Unsurprisingly, it's become the dominant Twitter client that I use.

Corebird is mostly a better Twitter client in general because it has much better support for modern Twitter features, even if it's not perfect and there are things from Choqok that I wish it did (even as options). It has niceties like displaying quoted tweets inline and letting me easily and rapidly look at attached media (pictures, animations, etc), and it's just more fluid in general (even if it has some awkward and missing bits, like frankly odd scrolling via the keyboard). Corebird has fast, smooth updates of new tweets more or less any time you want, and it can transparently pull in older tweets as you scroll backwards to a relatively impressive level. Going back to Choqok now actually feels clunky and limited, even though it has features that I theoretically rather want (apart from the bit where I know that several of those features are actually bad for me).

(Corebird's ability to display more things inline makes a surprising difference when skimming Twitter, because I can see more without having to click on links and spawn things in my browser and so on. I also worked out how to make Corebird open up multiple accounts on startup; it's hiding in the per-account settings.)

Corebird is a better Twitter client for me in specific because it clearly encourages me to have a healthier approach to Twitter, the approach I knew I needed a year ago. It's not actually good for me to have a Twitter client open all the time and to try to read everything, and it turns out that Corebird's lack of some features actively encourages me to not try to do this. There's no visible unread count to prod me to pay attention, there is no marker of read versus unread to push me to trying to read all of the unread Tweets one by one, and so on. That Corebird starts fast and lets me skim easily (and doesn't hide itself away in the system tray) also encourages me to close it and not pay attention to Twitter for a while. If I do keep Corebird running and peek in periodically, its combination of features make it easy and natural to skim, rapidly scan, or outright skip the new tweets, so I'm pretty sure I spend less time catching up than I did in Choqok.

(Fast starts matter because I know I can always come back easily if I really want to. As I have it configured, Choqok took quite a while to start up and there were side effects of closing it down with unread messages. In Corebird, startup is basically instant and I know that I can scroll backwards through my timeline to where I was, if I care enough. Mostly I don't, because I'm looking at Twitter to skim it for a bit, not to carefully read everything.)

The net result is that Corebird has turned checking Twitter into what is clearly a diversion, instead of something to actively follow. I call up Corebird when I want to spend some time on Twitter, and then if things get busy there is nothing to push me to get back to it and maybe I can quit out of it in order to make Twitter be even further away (sometimes Corebird helps out here by quietly crashing). This is not quite the 'stop fooling yourself you're not multitasking here' experience that using Twitter on my phone is, but it feels closer to it than Choqok did. Using Corebird has definitely been part of converting Twitter from a 'try to read it all' experience to a 'dip in and see what's going on' one, and the latter is much better for me.

(It turns out that I was right and wrong when I wrote about how UI details mattered for my Twitter experience. Back then I said that a significantly different client from Choqok would mean that my Twitter usage would have to change drastically. As you can see, I was right about that; my Twitter usage has changed drastically. I was just wrong about that necessarily being a bad thing.)