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Slack client for the terminal

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Re: Slack client for the terminal

#81

Post by pimeys »

Karunamon wrote: post #45
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.

...and push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client, and services that aren't hacky god-clients, and content storage, and previews/inlining, and.... About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems. Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improv…

> 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.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#82

Post by QasimK »

Mithaldu wrote: post #60
tomswartz07 wrote: post #8

Any reason to use this over the officially supported IRC/XMPP gateway? https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

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.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#83

Post by zzzcpan »

solarkraft wrote: post #66
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…

Plus: What about a history? Do I really have to have my client running to not miss stuff? That may have technical reasons, but is inconvenient.

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/

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#84

Post by derefr »

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…

> A change is not an improvement if it removes those.

If you see Slack as a replacement for IRC, then sure, it's not an improvement.

If you see Slack (and other proprietary solutions) as a capitalism-incentivized R&D lab for features that can then be absorbed into the open ecosystem, then it's nice that it exists, isn't it?

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#85

Post by diaz »

Viper007Bond wrote: post #31
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

You can actually connect to Slack via IRC: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

A colleague of mine uses through irc gateway but tells me a lot of stuff is not supported well like threads (which some people unfortunately started using more) and that you can't see edits, which many people also do. I think attachments and files are also a problem.

And slack is complete garbage that is pushed and we as employees most of the time have no other options.

Besides the whole problems mostly talked about related to memory and cpu usage, the one nobody seems to check or understand is that it is completely frustrating and unusable from accessibility point of view. I've seen this first hand as that person above is blind and the slack application is of one the worst offenders there is regarding this point. I've seen and felt his frustration and how slack team manages to avoid his point all the time.

So I hope it dies out eventually :D

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#86

Post by always_good »

pimeys wrote: post #81
Karunamon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client, and services that aren't hacky god-clients, and content storage, and previews/inlining, and.... About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems. Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improv…

> 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 communities like #node.js are really just 10 regulars.

For example, Elm's slack is vibrant. Elm's IRC channel is dead. This is the reality for most communities I've been joining these days.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#87

Post by Karunamon »

pimeys wrote: post #81
Karunamon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client, and services that aren't hacky god-clients, and content storage, and previews/inlining, and.... About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems. Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improv…

> 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.

But it gives up decentralization (and privacy) and still requires that you have a server to connect to anyways (read: server to set up and manage).

And on top of that, the behavior of irccloud from the standpoint of everyone else is identical to that of a bouncer like ZNC. It's yet another hack around the fact that clients don't exist in IRC unless they're online.

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#89

Post by rockostrich »

dawnerd wrote: post #25
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

I was gonna say there's no way slack uses that much, then I actually looked. 750+mb.... What in the world are they doing?

It's based on Electron[1] which has a reputation for being a bit of a resource hog. The upside is that it makes it really easy to create a cross-platform app.

[1] https://electronjs.org/

Re: Slack client for the terminal

#90

Post by mudetroit »

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.

So, I preface this by saying that I do feel like Slack could have better authentication mechanisms, decoupling the account from the networks. But I do think that some of this is by design as well.

I think it is worthwhile to think of each Slack organization as a completely independent and isolated network. This is one way that they can reasonably give some security to their corporate customers. I don't believe that there is any intention to ever lat you send a blind message to someone on another Slack organization, but maybe I am wrong there.

It would absolutely be nice however for me, as a user who is in multiple organizations, to be able to log in one time and have all of them be connected.

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