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Slack client for the terminal

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Re: Slack client for the terminal

#141

Post by giancarlostoro »

mping wrote: post #65

Obviously slack got something right, otherwise people would still use irc. It always amazes me how we devs fail to ack the business side of a success case as slack. And if any contender in the space fail to identify what slack got right they won't thrive. Maybe it was the ui, or some particular features, but they did resonate with the users. And now they are the benchmark that all the others will compare to.

Same issues as IRC are same ones XMPP suffers from... Decentralisation becomes confusing and the benefits are not obvious to regular end users. They just want to be on one network and download the "app" for that network. Slack and Discord fulfill these roles. IRC and XMPP have a dozen clients and no default server to join. I still think a well intentioned IRC client could do wonders for IRC.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#142

Post by mikewhy »

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.

> Why should 20MB hold less information today than it did in 1990?

64-bit, for one.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#143

Post by u801e »

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…

> The lack of conversations/threading is really annoying.

I find it interesting that people want to have threaded conversations in what is essentially a synchronous chat, but they prefer to have a degraded threading experience in their email client by using conversation view rather than traditional email threading using the Reply-To and/or References headers.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#145

Post by mattbierner »

lozenge wrote: post #43
antjanus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it taking up that much data? I'm at 550mbs with 6 very active teams and while on voice chat. Dropped out of voice chat I'm at 340mb. Each team has 10-20 channels. I also use Discord which uses Electron and with it, I'm on 8 separate active servers with anywhere from 10-30 channels. This sits at 115mb without an issue. Can you tell me where these electron metrics come from where people have slack take up 1gb or…

Every Slack workspace creates an Electron instance. If you're on three workspaces, that's like running three totally separate browsers.

More information about how Slack uses electron's Webview and BrowserView: https://slack.engineering/growing-pains-migrating-slacks-des...

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#146

Post by rspeer »

kqr wrote: post #101
rspeer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet every thread about Slack (or Discord or Gitter or whatever) is full of people saying "why not just use IRC"?, as if IRC could replace a complete service.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#147

Post by 52-6F-62 »

pimeys wrote: post #126
52-6F-62 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody could probably earn a lot of 'coffees' just building a C++ or Python Gtk UI that works with Slack's API, yeah? It couldn't be that rough, could it? I've done little interacting with the API's outside of simple bot integrations for a little fun.

I'd love to try my luck with this, but I'd also love to use Rust and QT. I need to do a bit of research is this even possible yet, or is it going to be fun at all...

Wow did I misfire! I meant Qt! Thank you

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#148

Post by qudat »

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

> A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM

Why do you care so much about RAM usage? All this concern over RAM is completely missing the picture here.

Every conversation about slack or electron people complain about RAM usage. The market could not give two shits about RAM usage so why does everyone on HN complain about it?

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#149

Post by qudat »

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.

> which presents a UI from 1990

Disagree, the reason why it is so popular is because of its slick UI.

> and the functionality of an IRC client.

Disagree. Did you read the other comments? An IRC client is not the same as a SaaS chat service that keeps history, video chat, infinite scroll, allows communication to happen even if a user is not online, etc.

Sorry to sound so harsh but saying that slack is just an IRC client with a 1990s UI shows a complete lack of understanding for why it has dominated the market for business chat.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#150

Post by astronautjones »

qudat wrote: post #148
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

> A chat client should not be taking over 1GB of RAM Why do you care so much about RAM usage? All this concern over RAM is completely missing the picture here. Every conversation about slack or electron people complain about RAM usage. The market could not give two shits about RAM usage so why does everyone on HN complain about it?

Because a large percentage of HN commenters are programmers? Wasteful is wasteful
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