Happy new year! I want to share a CLI tool I built for saving a local copy of any Twitter thread. It's called thread-safe and it's designed to do just that - keep your favorite threads safe on your local machine. This way you never have to worry that they might one day just disappear...
More seriously, I wanted a simple way to save threads of interest _without_ having to use a third-party app that needs access to my Twitter account (or vice-versa) and that forces me to reply to the thread to "unroll" or otherwise save a copy.
thread-safe generates an HTML file containing all of a thread's contents including each tweet's text, links, and media attachments (images and videos). The HTML file, all attachments, and a JSON data file are saved to the local filesystem and the HTML can be used to display the thread locally in a browser at any time.
By using a dedicated directory for all generated files, thread-safe can be used to maintain a local library of saved threads that can easily be searched using standard commandline tooling like (rip)grep, fzf, fd, and any other awesome tool of your choice.
I built thread-safe because I often find myself saving links to informative threads to try to preserve the author's content. This is exactly the use case that thread-safe addresses: generating local copies of these single-authored, consecutive series of informative tweets. Notably, thread-safe intentionally does not save the comments or discussion from other users that follow as its focus is on the saving the author's content.
I hope you might find it useful and I'd love to take any feedback or suggestions that might come to mind!
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