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Slack client for the terminal

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Re: Slack client for the terminal

#131

Post by lasereyes136 »

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

Slack is a billion dollar company because they made IRC accessible to the non-technical people. Technical people write a terminal client for it because they like being in a CLI for reasons. Making a popular service look and feel like the older service that inspired it is completely reasonable.

Different people, different needs, different drivers. Just don't expect the actions and motivations of different groups of people to align with each other. Sure as a while it doesn't seem to make sense but each individual part is reasonable on it's own. There must be a powerful German word for things systems that look crazy at the macro level but are reasonable at the micro level.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#132

Post by chubot »

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…

I'm explaining to the parent why "I don't understand this world" isn't a reasonable response. If you've used Slack and IRC for 5 minutes, you should know why most users prefer Slack, even if you prefer IRC.

I don't use Slack regularly, but I have tried it, and it is instantly obvious what the difference is. If you don't see it, then you probably have never designed software for end users. (FWIW, I also agree that Slack is bloated and that's one of the reasons I don't use it.)

As far as contributing to free software and open protocols, I'm working on fixing Unix shell. It would be great if IRC developers would take some inspiration from Slack and other proprietary services and fold them into IRC. Although, as mentioned in this thread, some of that may be very difficult or impossible without a commonly accepted client.

And I understand it's not a one person job. It probably requires a more coordinated effort. Decentralization has drawbacks as well as benefits.

What is not OK is pretending that problems with IRC don't exist. If you have that view, and spread it, then you guarantee that open protocols won't win.

I prefer open protocols, and I lament what has happened to Usenet and e-mail (trying to set up a mailing list for my open source project has been frustrating; spam causes problems for mailman-type lists). But honestly the proprietary services have innovated. They're not better in all respects, but they are better in some.

Open source doesn't mean being ignorant of users and dismissive of their complaints.

(FWIW I didn't know about IRCCloud. It looks interesting and I may check it out.)

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#133

Post by pimeys »

always_good wrote: post #86
pimeys wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client https://irccloud.com has all these, done really well. Offline message history you get also by running a server somewhere and just having an irssi in a screen/tmux. Still my favorite protocol and I have some channels that I consider to be my favorite social network for about 10-15 years already.

I pay for irccloud, but most people don't. It's annoying trying to talk to someone who disconnects when they shut their laptop and will never receive your message. Not very good tooling to build a community or relationships, that's for sure. Having to pay for basic features that competitors like slack/discord have is exactly why the slack community for something is often much bigger these days. Even the larger commun…

Depends where you chat. Some rave/techno channels are still very active since the last 25 years. For English speaking crowd, at least #haskell, #rust and ##ibmthinkpad are having lots of discussion every day. But maybe it's just me. I've been using IRC since 1995 and I see it much nicer compared to the centralized bloat of a chat Slack is.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#134

Post by jethro_tell »

QasimK wrote: post #82
Mithaldu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly this if it still happens: https://rjbs.manxome.org/rubric/entry/2110

I know someone who uses the gateway but it was a long while before we (I) found out that he didn't receive edits or emoji reactions, which may or may not have caused significant miscommunications.

when did correcting your message become so hard that we needed editS?

*edits

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#135

Post by chubot »

ergothus wrote: post #121
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…

Slack addresses some of the problems, but not all: > The lack of conversations/threading is really annoying. Slack is arguably worse - they recently added threading (really comments that can go on a post - there is no nesting), but this has made me much more likely to miss any follow-up because messages are less visible than otherwise. > By default there seems to be a lot of leave/join spam. I used IRC for a year bef…

I'm responding to the parent, who was questioning the existence of Slack, because IRC already exists. That's not reasonable, as I explained in the comment you're replying to, and even more in another reply.

IRC doesn't work "perfectly fine", at least in the context of the problems that Slack solves.

I think we largely agree on technical matters; it's a matter of what relevance this has to the OP -- a Slack client for the terminal.

If your stance is that IRC is irrelevant to this thread because Slack and IRC solve different problems, then I might mostly agree. But I didn't bring up IRC!

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#136

Post by tachyoff »

TickleSteve wrote: post #128
tachyoff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such an unfair comparison, though (and really, with 8+ GB of RAM being the norm, 20 MB is still pretty svelte). Java has an entire virtual machine and runtime, whereas a C program is just a binary that gets loaded straight into memory.

functionally and computationally, the tiny C program and the java monster would be doing the same thing.... So yes, they're comparable. Choosing inefficient ways to do things (in the case of Java) is not a way to escape comparison.

You can't say "wow, look how much smaller the C program is" and then ignore why it's so much smaller in the first place (no runtime, no garbage collection, etc.) If that's the case, then we should hand-roll assembly all the time because it's "smaller". You also can't just call Java inefficient because it produces larger programs or is "slower". It's all about choosing the right tool for the job.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#137

Post by derefr »

deckard1 wrote: post #125
derefr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC doesn't solve those problems; individual users solve those problems on top of IRC (and usually not very well.) A proper open-ecosystem solution would involve network-level history-storage-and-retrieval nodes (basically archival peers in the IRC protocol), and additions to the protocol to direct archive-access queries to those nodes.

> A proper open-ecosystem solution Not sure what you mean by "open ecosystem solution." IRC is literally just a few RFCs, a variety of server software, and a variety of client software. It's as extendable as you need it, and most networks have their own extensions already. Is that not open enough for you? > IRC doesn't solve those problems; individual users solve those problems As opposed to...? AI solving them? Do w…

> Is that not open enough for you?

I was trying to contrast with existing solutions—IRCCloud, for example, "solves" the problem of history search by effectively wrapping IRC into a proprietary web cloud service.

By an "open-ecosystem solution", I mean a solution that applies to anyone and everyone who uses the IRC protocol, rather than only for users of some specific client.

I'm not saying IRC isn't amenable to open-ecosystem solutions; I'm saying that nobody has (yet) tried to solve this problem in an open-ecosystem way.

> As opposed to...?

As opposed to network-operators being enabled to solve these problems for users of their networks.

Consider the contrast of POP3 vs. IMAP. In POP3, the tasks of "email storage" and "email search" are left to the user, and often they'll solve them badly (by e.g. setting up direct POP3 connections from several devices to one POP3 account, ending up with random emails living only on one or another device, whichever one happened to pull them.) In IMAP, by contrast, email storage and indexing happen on the IMAP server, and users don't need to worry about it. But, since the solution doesn't involve any proprietary services, users can still "take control" of the process if they want—in this case, by setting up their own IMAP server. They just don't have to do that.

> You're free to write and propose your own RFCs and extend IRC however you wish.

I think we're in violent agreement about that. My point was that nobody seems to want to do that for the IRC ecosystem vis-a-vis network-level message archiving.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#138

Post by ivm »

Siecje wrote: post #42
brandonmenc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then everyone should feel stupid for not realizing you could make a billion dollars creating a sane sign-up and account management system for IRC.

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.

Discord also has amazing performance. I guess it's because gamers would be mad for something like Slack eating up all the computer's resources.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#139

Post by aidenn0 »

arghwhat wrote: post #130
aidenn0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is it obscene? Ram runs between $3-$10 per GB, so 20MB is 6-20 cents of hardware. That's far cheaper than using 20kB of ram in 1990 ($2 of hardware).

The price of RAM is not a relevant parameter. Why should 20MB hold less information today than it did in 1990? Especially for this application, which presents a UI from 1990, and the functionality of an IRC client.

Because the engineering costs have not gone down so it may not make sense to spend the effort to reduce memory usage.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#140

Post by wink »

gsich wrote: post #56
typon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh c'mon. Slack absolutely destroys IRC in terms of usability. And that's what ends up counting in the end.

If you count the official program, then no. That Electron based garbage is unusable. I use Slack with the IRC gateway.

which has its share of problems, just from the top of my head:

- you will miss edits

- in some cases when people sign up with their email addresses, you now have "info" and "mail" as nicknames, because they signed up with info@example.org and only the slack client shows "joe".

- everytime someone pastes a snippet, you'll have to open it in a browser anyway (ok, minor issue)

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