
Slack client for the terminal - _hv99
https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term
======
loser777
What does the current emoji support look like?
([https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-
term/blob/b871a9ad0c8...](https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-
term/blob/b871a9ad0c8d610d9e55ef819d86ca8b6aeb2ed3/service/slack.go#L475)
seems to suggest they aren't rendered?)

In my experience custom emojis is the most important driver of Slack use ;).

~~~
rch
I have emojis turned off. Great feature.

------
mping
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.

~~~
giancarlostoro
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.

------
NikolaeVarius
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

~~~
qudat
> 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?

~~~
c22
Probably because their $3000 desktops are grinding to a crawl under these
unwieldy stacks of cruft. The market might not care but that's only because
most users are too naive to realize that spending hundreds to thousands of
dollars a year upgrading their phones and laptops is neither necessary nor
desirable. Eventually consumers in this space will gain more awareness and
these wasteful software development practices will have to end.

------
arghwhat
I miss the days where people recognized that using using 20MB of RAM for a
trivial task is obscene.

(Great tool, much better than the awful official client, but 20MB is actually
a lot of RAM.)

~~~
u801e
There's an old joke about emacs standing for eight megabytes and continuously
swapping.

But I think it's more useful to think about the percentage use of RAM for a
given application. If you're running on a machine with 32 MB of RAM, then
using 20 MB for a single application is obscene. But if you're running 32 GB,
it's insignificant.

Even so, a single application shouldn't be using a significant percentage of
system RAM on an average consumer grade laptop/desktop (4 to 16 GB of RAM).

~~~
arghwhat
If you have 32GB of _free_ memory, then 20MB is insignificant. Installed RAM
is not an interesting number.

I'm currently on a 16GB machine, where I only have a terminal, a text editor
and a browser with few (<10) _mild_ (wikipedia, hn, ...) tabs open. That gives
351 processes using a total of 8.7GB memory (2.11GB of which is unswappable,
and about 1 gig of already compressed memory). My 3GB of disk caches go on top
of that, and 0.5GB has already been swapped out.

I sure have room for a 20MB binary _right now_. However, on an 8GB system, I'd
be in the red. I would already be swapping several GB, and _any_ allocation
would either evict (useful!) caches or swap out the memory of another process.

 _Any_ memory allocated in that state reduces the performance of some other
component of the system.

Of course, 20MB is _much_ better than the status-quo of casually burning a few
hundred MB (or even a few GB) for simple tasks, and the situation of being out
of memory with a whopping 8GB is caused primarily by the other "bad citizens",
but the point here is that 20MB is indeed a quite big chunk of memory in real-
world use-cases.

------
tomswartz07
Any reason to use this over the officially supported IRC/XMPP gateway?

[https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP)

~~~
Mithaldu
Possibly this if it still happens:
[https://rjbs.manxome.org/rubric/entry/2110](https://rjbs.manxome.org/rubric/entry/2110)

~~~
QasimK
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.

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

*edits

~~~
u801e
I've always used the sed style edits over the IRC gateway. Then someone let me
know that they don't work. I always thought that people just read them and
parsed the correction manually rather than relying on their client to do it.
It's not like I use very complext sed substitutions.

s/complext/complex/

------
yankcrime
Alternatively, this plugin: [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack) for WeeChat is surprisingly
full-featured.

------
kylehotchkiss
I just want something between this and Slack's mac app, which sometimes
doesn't want to load on even Starbucks wifi. Ideally a GUI app that can load
messages on airplane wifi would be amazing. Every time I try to open slack on
an airplane it just sits there loading and loading and loading.

Maybe one day!

~~~
LocutusOfBorges
Eul seems like it might fit that requirement:

[https://eul.im/](https://eul.im/)

~~~
adamrezich
>Windows support will be out in late February

 _glances at watch_

------
ptman
I would hope that people would spend their effort improving open systems
instead of closed ones. The same effort could be spent improving matrix (via a
terminal client if one of the existing ones don't suit or improving the slack
bridge or implementing features slack has and matrix is missing)

~~~
btschaegg
While I would generally agree with the idea, I think it's also important to
see that people aren't always in the position to _choose_ said open systems.

I presume most of the non-commercial projects posted on HN are started to
scratch an itch of the autor, which might as well be that they're stuck with a
closed system that sucks. Trying to improve that situation somewhat seems
sensible to me.

------
Barrin92
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

~~~
chubot
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/](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 where the
beginning of a conversation is. I have to read messages backward to find the
beginning .

\- By default there seems to be a lot of leave/join spam. I used IRC for a
year before turning this off and it vastly improved my experience.

\- I think most clients don't save anything by default. When I reboot my
computer and don't log in again, I miss messages.

\- Having to use pastebins for code is annoying.

I'm sure that someone will respond with how you can solve all these problems
with a certain IRC client. But I don't want to do that. I'm not technically
unsophisticated -- I write software in 5+ languages and I know all about Unix
and networking. I just don't want to spend my mental energy on my chat client
-- I have tons of other projects to spend it on.

So I only use IRC when necessary; I use e-mail otherwise (through GMail.)

Of course, I also don't use Slack. But from what I hear it solves some of
these problems.

~~~
kqr
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 of them and you'd be wrong.)

I don't see why it would be much more exhausting to use a hosted IRC service
like IRCCloud to solve your problems than pick a specific alternative protocol
entirely.

~~~
chubot
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.)

------
dewey
Fun project but if you are just looking for a less crappy experience than
their default client you could just use irssi and the Slack IRC gateway?

~~~
guessmyname
Not if your employer disabled the IRC Gateway, like in my case.

This terminal client seems to be using Slack's public web API.

------
Mikushi
For those looking for another alternative to the heavy weight Slack client:

[https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical](https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical)

Been using it, works fine as well. Good job OP though, diversity of offering
is always good!

------
aidenn0
Now I want a mattermost version of this; the mattermost native client for
linux is so terrible as to be nigh unusable (I need to restart it every 24-72
hours as it just hangs regularly).

~~~
42wim
Maybe
[https://github.com/42wim/matterircd](https://github.com/42wim/matterircd) can
help you. It also supports slack (experimental)

~~~
aidenn0
Did you write that? Thanks!

I actually do use this, but it is missing a lot of useful features, some of
which seem unimplementable in IRC

One example: the mattermost clients won't register a message as "read" until
you switch to that view, so if e.g. I check messages on my phone, I will see
unread messages, but IRC doesn't have a way of communicating this between
client and server so matterircd seems to mark all messages as "read" with
mattermost)

~~~
42wim
Yes, it does mark them all as read. (because they're technically read by the
irc client, even if you haven't yet)

I'm open for ideas on how to fix this, eg manually sending a /quote read
command is maybe an option with irc client plugins.

(feel free to open issues with feature requests btw)

------
greesil
Reading this from lynx.

------
thriftwy
I remember there was a multi-IM client called centericq which was console-
based and pretty awesome. I used it for several years back when ICQ was still
a thing.

Yes I know about irssi and friends, but they're not really having an UI, many
things are commands or config based, but centericq was.

------
jamesgeck0
This cool, but not terribly usable right now if your team uses threads a lot.
Thread messages are mixed into the main channel with no context and no way to
reply to them.

------
caiob
Apps like Slack make millions of dollars every day. What's their excuse to not
hire platform-oriented devs to build native apps that run smoother?

~~~
sotojuan
Because the amount of users who don't care or notice performance or memory
usage issues is immensely greater than the amount who cares.

~~~
ch4s3
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.

~~~
DanHulton
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.

~~~
namelost
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.

~~~
megaman22
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...

------
deevus
slack-term is built on termui which only supports 8 colours. At this point in
time it's a bit of a deal breaker for me.

------
gumby
For people like me this is much nicer than the electron app

(not to imply that the electron app isn't nicer to some people)

------
Demiurge
I would give a lot for a discord, slack and irc integrated client!

------
gruez
meanwhile, my IRC client: under 10MB of RAM.

------
feelin_googley
Original title said something about "20MB".

Is that how much memory this requires to run?

