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Slack client for the terminal

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Re: Slack client for the terminal

#101

Post by kqr »

rspeer wrote: post #91
zzzcpan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC solves these problems via things like bots and bouncers. Although running always connected irssi client [1] in a screen [2] on a server is probably the easiest way to achieve it. [1] https://irssi.org/ [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

And other platforms solve this problem by having history as a built-in feature, which apparently IRC can never get due to inertia.

IRC is not a service. It's a protocol. There are services built on IRC mentioned in this thread which have history as a built-in feature.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#102

Post by ch4s3 »

jlg23 wrote: post #14
ch4s3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that's a poor excuse, and leaves open a lot of room for competition. There's a lot of hubris in assuming their position as a market leader is unassailable.

> There's a lot of hubris in assuming their position as a market leader is unassailable. This is only your very free interpretation of the comment you responded to. I personally only encounter slack in companies I freelance for - if it does not perform, I file a ticket with whoever does office supplies and demand a bigger computer.

Well yeah, of course it's just my opinion. I think my experience with Slack is pretty different, as I use it in my 9-5, and we often have to find work arounds for places where it's just plain broken. Specifically, the screen sharing and video calls often just don't work.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#103

Post by kqr »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #92
rrggrr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is barely useable, and I use it every day. Grief includes: - Huge, rigid, unskinnable UI. - Difficult, multi-step access to configurations and settings. - No OS integration therefore no desktop automation. I probably should have stuck with Hipchat, but I jumped on the Slack bandwagon along with everyone else.

What skinning features would you like to see in Slack? You can at least set color schemes to help visually distinguish workspaces.

One of my grievances was the missing ability to remove or at least drastically shrink most parts of the UI. When I set the window to the desired size, the actual area where peoples messages appeared was ridiculously small. One would think that's not how you treat the most important part of your UI.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#104

Post by rekoros »

rockostrich wrote: post #97
ch4s3 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that's a poor excuse, and leaves open a lot of room for competition. There's a lot of hubris in assuming their position as a market leader is unassailable.

Hipchat, Facebook's Workplace, and whatever Microsoft's service is are all competitors but I don't think any of them are serious. Hipchat is probably the biggest competitor, but that's because it was around before Slack. When there's a serious competitor in the space, then I'm sure they'll start caring. For now, I don't think anything else is close.

https://hipchat.com

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#105

Post by aidenn0 »

kqr wrote: post #68
chubot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love using Unix and the terminal, but I hate using IRC. I don't think it works "perfectly fine". I have been lurking on a few IRC channels due to my work on http://www.oilshell.org/ . Problems I noticed: - The lack of conversations/threading is really annoying. Most worthwhile IRC channels have more than one conversation going on at once. Not only do you have to untangle who's talking to who, there's no way to know…

I think you are focusing on the wrong thing by spending several paragraphs on the problems with the out-of-the-box experience and only one on the fact that it is an open protocol so a sufficiently technical user can fix it . An open protocol, free choice of clients, and decentralised infrastructure is a baseline. A change is not an improvement if it removes those. (You could argue you have valid reasons to remove any…

If you want "An open protocol, free choice of clients, and decentralised infrastructure" then Jabber and Matrix are both much closer competitors to slack. IRCv3 is a step in the right direction for IRC, but is not as far along as either of those.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#106

Post by jerf »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #9

I use this personally. Its great. Hides all the cruft that people post in slack as text. I've been working on trying to extend it on the side. A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM

What's the advantages of using the client vs. using it as a tab in your browser? Tab in the browser seems to be working for me OK, once I figured out I could "pin" the tab in Firefox, which prevented me from accidentally closing it.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#107

Post by aidenn0 »

kqr wrote: post #79
zitterbewegung wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also , infinite scroll back , a standard set of easy to use clients, hosted services and API integrations.

I fail to see how those things should be part of the protocol. That's like complaining HTTP doesn't support tags for your bookmarks. It's so out of scope. Unless, of course, you are talking about a user-friendly service offering IRC access to those who do not want to set up their own clients. So, something like IRCCloud, which does exist, fyi.

Infinite scrollback is only possible with support from the protocol: if you assume that partitions happen between two servers or between the client and the server, then the client will not be able to see every message that happens so cannot provide the scrollback.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#108

Post by jaytaylor »

chubot wrote: post #50
Barrin92 wrote: post #20

So we've gone from IRC which worked perfectly fine to a billion dollar business just to port that software back to the terminal, where we started out to begin with I don't understand this world any more

I love using Unix and the terminal, but I hate using IRC. I don't think it works "perfectly fine". I have been lurking on a few IRC channels due to my work on http://www.oilshell.org/ . Problems I noticed: - The lack of conversations/threading is really annoying. Most worthwhile IRC channels have more than one conversation going on at once. Not only do you have to untangle who's talking to who, there's no way to know…

Unsolicited feedback for you @chubot, in case you're open to it:

Clicking through to oilshell - I wanted to know what is different and exciting about it, but all I found was text saying it's "new". Making the value proposition clearer would go a long way and be a big help to people who are curious and geniunely want to understand what's amazing about your creation.. !

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#110

Post by kainosnoema »

aviv wrote: post #58
Siecje wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it sane. Why do I have to sign up for different Slack organizations and have a different password for each one? Why can't I private message someone on Slack with just a username? I think Discord does this much better.

I'm guessing because of deep technical debt from some very early decisions made.

Yes. As of a couple years ago at least, Slack was a monolithic PHP app that could support a few thousand users in a single team. Each “workspace” was assigned to a server and scaled vertically. LinkedIn notoriously had two Slack workspaces in order to support all of their users, and I’m guessing other large companies have had to do the same.

I’m sure Slack is using their vast resources and large team to solve these problems at this point, but it probably hasn’t been easy to create a horizontally scalable system from the early codebase, especially when the data model was designed for a single team of users.

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