Clicking the configuration button at the top right will open the options dialog. It contains three tabs for visual, notification and connection settings.

Visual Settings

configure visual settings

The visual settings allow to configure if the window should automatically be opened when you start twhirl, if it should always float in front of other program even when not active, if it should hide when minized and if you want the input area to be automatically closed after sending an update to twitter. The transparency percentage is applied to the window when it is not active.

Also, the font and text size for displaying and entering text can be changed. After changing these, you should close and reconnect the window to use the new settings.

Notification Settings

configure notifications

When twhirl receives new tweets to show in the timeline, it can notify you about this by displaying a small window at the bottom right of your screen and playing a short sound. You can disable notifications at all, set whether they play a sound and adjust its volume, and configure if you want to be notified when twhirl receives tweets you wrote yourself.

Connection Settings

By default, twhirl will auto-refresh tweets from your friends, relies and direct messages. But there is a thing that has to be considered: Twitter allows only up to 70 requests to the service per hour and per account. twhirl tries to ensure to stay below that limit as good as it can. Requesting your friends’ tweets, your replies and direct messages require a request each, so it is fairly easy to reach the limit.

configure connection settings

This is how the twhirl auto-refresh works: in the configuration, you can set the total number of requests twhirl may use for auto-refreshs per hour (maximum 60). By adjusting the sliders, you can modify how many of the available requests are used for each entry type. From these settings twhirl calculates at which intervals new data is requested. An approximate interval is displayed to the right of each slider.

Here is an example: You allow twhirl to use 40 requests per hour for auto-refreshing. Then, you define a percentage of 50% for tweets, 30% for replies and 20% for direct messages. Now, twhirl will use 20 requests per hour to refresh tweets, 12 requests to get new replies, and 8 requests to look for new direct messages. The requests are ditributed equally over the hour, so there is a request for new tweets every 3 minutes, for replies every 5 minutes, and for direct messages ever 7.5 minutes.

This sounds a bit complicated, and in fact, it is, unfortunately. But on the other hand, twhirl comes with default values you can use out-of-the-box, and most users will do. But if you want to tweak the connection settings, here you can.

Saving Your Changes

After changing configuration, click “Save” to set the new options, or “Cancel” to close the dialog without saving the changes.