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Slack client for the terminal

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Re: Slack client for the terminal

#51

Post by drb91 »

Karunamon wrote: post #48
tachyoff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which usability features are they? The 3 GB of RAM usage, the battery-draining, or the culture of “always-on” availability and interruptions?

Your failure to set your coworker's expectations for your availability or the failures of organizational culture being projected onto the messaging tool are not the fault of the messaging tool.

This ignores the fact that if you don’t respond to people contacting you you’ll get fired. As a salary you have no voice.

The market simply optimizes for whatever is easiest for a ceo to install and maintain.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#52

Post by megaman22 »

namelost wrote: post #38
DanHulton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a fair amount of hubris in assuming that assuming that you know the market better than the market leader. They're killing it for a reason, and it just may be that the market they're targeting cares more about the app Just Working than about the RAM consumption.

Slack is merely the latest contender in a very long succession of group chat technologies. They will be usurped one day, but they are substantially accelerating their demise by making their product so infuriatingly slow.

Microsoft is gunning for them hard with Teams. It's not really a very good product, but it might win traction just by being bundled into their Office 365 subscriptions.

Microsoft does have people on staff that know how to make an Electron app not suck really horribly, though whether any of that expertise from the DevTools branch makes its way to Office and the red-haired stepchild UC teams...

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#53

Post by Karunamon »

drb91 wrote: post #51
Karunamon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your failure to set your coworker's expectations for your availability or the failures of organizational culture being projected onto the messaging tool are not the fault of the messaging tool.

This ignores the fact that if you don’t respond to people contacting you you’ll get fired. As a salary you have no voice. The market simply optimizes for whatever is easiest for a ceo to install and maintain.

How is this Slack's fault, again? Or is the argument that messaging systems should be hard to install so they aren't misused?

Seriously, what even is this comment chain getting at? If you work somewhere where always-on is a hard requirement, it doesn't matter what messaging system is used. Any place that would fire you for muting notifications would just as easily fire you for turning off email notifications.

In short: Let's stop blaming the damn tool for something that is the fault of the humans using it.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#54

Post by vbezhenar »

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

Current software stacks are incredibly bloated. I recently wrote a simple Java web server. I took care no to use unnecessary memory, I didn't use a single library for it, yet it can't do even basic functions without OOM unless I'm giving it 16MB RAM for heap (and it eats even more for other things). So almost 20 MB RAM for hello world. And that's for relatively efficient VM. I guess, similar web server written with C would use around 20 KB RAM (and most of it for I/O buffers).

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#55

Post by guessmyname »

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 created my own Terminal client to communicate with Slack [1].

I did it because I like IRC, but my employer (and many of my co-workers) love Slack.

I dislike Slack, having the option to connect to an IRC gateway (unless your employer disabled this option) or to communicate with their API service with a program like this one (linked above) or mine (linked below) is good for people who still need to communicate with their peers but want to do so through the program that they are more comfortable with, in this case, the Terminal.

[1] https://github.com/cixtor/slackapi

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#56

Post by gsich »

typon wrote: post #37
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

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.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#57

Post by vlunkr »

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

This is for the people who want to use IRC but work somewhere that requires Slack. Obligatory relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1782/

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#58

Post by aviv »

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.

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

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#59

Post by gsich »

Karunamon wrote: post #53
drb91 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores the fact that if you don’t respond to people contacting you you’ll get fired. As a salary you have no voice. The market simply optimizes for whatever is easiest for a ceo to install and maintain.

How is this Slack's fault, again? Or is the argument that messaging systems should be hard to install so they aren't misused? Seriously, what even is this comment chain getting at? If you work somewhere where always-on is a hard requirement, it doesn't matter what messaging system is used. Any place that would fire you for muting notifications would just as easily fire you for turning off email notifications. In shor…

Probably because Slack makes it easier to establish an "always-on" culture.
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