I don’t like the way the official Twitter app for the Mac currently handles retweets. You’re given two options, to use Twitter’s baked-in retweet feature, or to quote a tweet.
If you choose the quote option, the app does just that, it generates a new tweet that simply wraps the tweet you want to reference in quotes like so:
This, however, is far from ideal for all sorts of reasons having to do with everything from conventions to readability to aesthetics. Classic style retweets are the way to go.
Thankfully, there is a way to get classic style retweets in the Mac Twitter app.
- Quit the Twitter app and open up the Terminal.
- Copy and paste the following line into the Terminal and hit return.
defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac DebugMode -bool true - Re-open the Twitter app and open up Preferences. You should see a new preference pane called “Secret.”
- Enter “RT @{USERNAME}: {TEXT}” in the Quote Syntax field.
- To make this stick, click back on “General” and then back on “Secret” before closing Preferences.
- Now, when you choose “Quote Tweet…” the app should generate a classic style retweet.
