As some of you might have seen already, I have started to work on the command
line tool `piston` that helps people to interface with STEEM and is easy to
integrate into your scripts.

After two weeks of coding, `piston` turned out as a very powerful tool for me
already and I would like to share it with you and continue work on it even more
to grow it into the Swiss army knife for Steem.

## Quick-Start

Using piston is quite easy, after installation with

    pip3 install --user steem-piston

you will get a new executable `piston` installed in `~/.local/bin`. You need to
add the posting private key in wallet import format (wif) with

    piston addkey

You will be asked to provide a passphrase for encryption of your new piston
wallet. You can pick an empty password to prevent the prompt in future but make
sure to understand the risk of storing unencrypted private keys on your computer.

After providing your **posting** key. It will be stored in your local wallet and
you can list your accounts with 

    piston listaccounts

The account name listed can be used to post, reply, or edit (own) posts using
piston. Try posting a new post with

    piston post

Edit a post with

    piston edit @author/permlink

Or repy to an existing post (e.g. this post) with

    piston reply @xeroc/piston

You can take a look at recent posts by simply using

    piston list

## Documentation

The full documentation can (of course) be 
[found on STEEM](/@xeroc/piston-readme) and is kept up to date with 
[github's version](https://github.com/xeroc/piston/blob/master/README.md).

## License

Well, it's **open source** and MIT licensed.

## Get involved

There is much that can be added to `piston` that I can come up with on my own.
But I am sure, the STEEM crowd can come up with may more ways of improving
piston than me alone. You can participate in improving piston by joining 

* this discussion and report bugs
* this discussion and proposing new features
* the team as a python developer
* the team as an application developer on top of `piston`

Since I am not getting payed for building this tool directly. I would appreciate
if you upvote **this** post, as well as posts of major contributors in this
read.

After installation of `piston`, you can join the discussion with:

    piston reply @xeroc/piston

### !"$%

Who can guess what `piston` stands for? Well, it's not a Swiss army knife :)