twi is a keyboard-first Twitch chat client written in Go. Read and send chat, switch channels, and watch raids roll in — without a browser tab, and without your OAuth token ever showing up in a log.
Start with nothing open, find a channel, open a second one, and reply — the same keys you would actually press, in order.
/channels, or press space c.Every surface is keyboard-reachable, resize-aware, and designed to stay readable when chat is moving fast.
Claude, Catppuccin, Dracula, Gruvbox, Nord, Tokyo Night, Kanagawa, Everforest, Ayu, Solarized and more, plus 24 vibrant near-black presets authored for twi (Neon Tokyo, Cyberpunk, Matrix, Hotline, Plasma, Ruby, Bullion, Obsidian and friends) — 52 dark, 5 light, plus a custom hex palette. Preview them live with a full-screen picker.
Grouped blocks with an author header, dense inline rows, or a stripped-back compact view. Swap between them at runtime with ctrl+g.
Each chatter gets a stable hash-derived color that carries into their name, the message surface, and the gutter rail — so you recognize regulars at a glance.
Type @ and a prefix to complete from people actually in chat, ranked by who spoke most recently. tab accepts.
Broadcaster, mod, VIP and sub badges render as compact icons, alongside sub tenure, follow age, and how long you have seen someone in chat.
Raids, subs, cheers, follows, and join/leave events land in a dedicated column with per-kind glyphs — noisy reconnect bursts collapse automatically.
OAuth tokens, refresh tokens, client secrets, and callback values are kept out of normal output, debug logs, and diagnostics by design.
Run the whole UI with no credentials and no network. Great for trying twi, taking screenshots, or debugging your terminal setup.
twi doctor checks config, credentials, scopes, terminal capability, and API reachability — and reports what it could not verify.
Every image below is generated by rendering twi's actual view and converting the terminal output to SVG, so it cannot drift from what the app prints.
claude.
tokyo-night.
catppuccin-mocha.
Unretouched terminal captures from a live Twitch session — two channels open, real chat, real activity feed. Click any frame for the full-size image.
solarized-dark.
Press ctrl+t to preview live and enter to save, or set theme_name in config. Swatches below are the real palette values.
Try it with no credentials first — mock mode needs no Twitch app, no token, and no network.
Bring your own Twitch app. twi ships without a bundled Twitch application. Register a personal app in the Twitch developer console and give twi its client ID and secret — see the setup walkthrough.
Scopes: reading chat needs chat:read; sending from the composer also needs
chat:edit. twi validates token identity, expiry, and scopes before it connects.
No username to configure. twi authenticates as whichever account the token belongs to — Twitch requires the IRC login to be the token's own account. The channels you join are independent: sign in as one account and read or send in any channel you aren't banned from.
Press ? in the app for expanded help — unless you're typing a message, in which case it's just a question mark.
The built-in set went from 13 to 33: Catppuccin Macchiato and Frappé, Rosé Pine Moon, Everforest, Kanagawa, Ayu, Night Owl, Palenight, Synthwave '84, Oceanic Next, Nightfox, Zenburn, Cobalt2, Horizon — plus twi's first five light palettes. Every preset is contrast-tested against its own background and pane surface.
A shared text-effect engine — typewriter, gradient wave, shimmer, and a bouncing marker
with a fading trail — drives the splash tagline and the empty state off the same ~10fps
clock. Every effect holds its label's width, so nothing reflows, and
animation_mode = "off" renders the same words statically.
/channels (or space c) opens a picker that autocompletes
from the channels you follow and accepts any name you type. Channels join and part on the
live connection, --channels a,b opens several at once, and starting with none
at all is fine.
i/o/a start typing, esc returns to chat, j/k select messages, and space is a leader: e for the channel sidebar, c to open a channel, x to close one. Inspect moved to K. The mouse reaches tabs, the sidebar, and picker rows.
The IRC login is now derived from your OAuth token instead of config, so
twitch_username is optional. Signing in as one account and chatting in another
channel just works — a stale username is a warning, not a startup failure.
Membership tracking powers @mention autocomplete, per-author context
(role, sub tenure, follow age), a live chatter count, and join/leave rows in the
activity column.