
Using Slack through an IRC client - EduardoBautista
https://www.eduardobautista.com/slack-through-irc/
======
ahnberg
I can also recommend you to look at: [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack)

~~~
dijit
I came here to say this exact same thing.

It has some quirks (like not linking to pictures that are posted in chan, I
did try to fix that myself) but generally it's the most full featured cli
slack client I've used. You can even upload files.

Highly recommended.

------
zapzupnz
Seeing a lot of comments on the thread to the tune of "just use IRC; I don't
use the features that Slack et al offer on top of IRC, so neither should
anybody else".

You can have your opinions about Slack, about its apps being rubbish, about it
being proprietary, whatever. But imagining that your personal use case, and
those of your peers who probably are of a similar technical inclination,
should represent the be-all and end-all of real-time online communication for
groups is really unhelpful.

Yes, Slack and its ilk aren't perfect, but neither is IRC. What would be
really great is if the IRC protocol could evolve to support some of these new
features, perhaps with some sort of minimum specification for graphical
clients that want to implement these new features — and graceful fallbacks for
those that don't and text-based client users.

~~~
dijit
Good news; [https://ircv3.net/irc/](https://ircv3.net/irc/)

Now if only we had millions in VC money to create nice new clients.

~~~
zapzupnz
I've seen this before. The changes look rather modest as far as the gap
between IRC and things like Discord and Slack go.

~~~
dijit
Isn’t that kind of the point. A conservative approach to adding features so
that they can be at least implemented well and understood?

What are the main, real benefits slack has over IRC;

* resilience to network disruption

* onboarding of new users.

* inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this)

You could argue threads or SIP/VOIP but my admittedly anecdotal evidence
suggests that these are seldom used. And, there’s no reason IRC could not
expand to relay those.

~~~
zapzupnz
> A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least
> implemented well and understood?

Well, sure. But while IRC slowly proposes and implements relatively basic
features of modern clients, the world will go on without it. That's already
happening.

Not that this is a problem for existing IRC users, evidently. But if this is
the case, and it's accepted, then it would be great if some HN users would
stop trying to pretend that IRC has everything that people want — if that were
the case, we'd not have all these alternatives.

> * inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this)

Which is why part of what I said, and I know you didn't specifically reply to
it but I must restate it, is some sort of minimal specification for graphical
clients to present the user-facing features that people expect of a modern
chat client, voluntarily entered into but with the potential as a great
feature to advertise the modernity of a client.

My thinking is that otherwise someone will just make their own Slack knock-off
IRC client, bundle it with their own IRCd, and we'll re-enter the IRC wars
again. Proprietary IRC with a proprietary client — not that much different
from any other proprietary solution other than IRC users reaping none of the
benefits.

Going on to the main benefits of Slack, I can't really speak to Slack.
However, I'm a Discord user, and I know Discord is inspired of Slack. What I'd
like from Discord is:

\- persistent session without needing a bouncer, or a simulation of such (e.g.
when I connect, show me the last few messages on the server; when I scroll up,
keep showing me more)

\- an easily customisable role-based permission system rather than the
relatively simplistic op/hop/voice, with customisable symbols (as opposed to
colours)

\- channel categories

\- consistent and predictable text formatting, including a subset of Markdown
— if I show a code block, I want everybody to see it as a code block (even if
all that means is forcing a fixed-width font for a given block of text)

\- separating a user's identity from their username, allowing multiple users
to use the same nick differentiated by a discriminator

\- avatars!

\- push notifications!

It's all the little things that add up to a pleasant experience with things
like Slack and Discord. I'm sure many will see many of those things as quite
separate from an IRC, but these are the things to which people are now
accustomed.

------
softwaredoug
My “mixed reviews” probably have more to do with slack being scatterbrained
from a product direction. Look how poorly threading works nearly all of the
time, with half of the conversation buried in a thread, the other half leaking
out. Another example is how social link previews push the entire conversation
up.

I love a lot of the tech work being done at Slack, but a lot of the product
doesn’t feel particularly thoughtful.

~~~
u801e
I never really found threading very useful in a live group chat. Most people
would either mention the nick of the person they were responding to, or they
would quote part of the text they were responding to and append their
response. That's actually a lot easier to follow compared to having to click
on a link and have it open in another window panel.

Though I do find it interesting that there are those who want threading in a
group chat setting, yet they aren't interested in threaded discussions via
email or usenet. Modern email clients/platforms actually use a limited
threading model that's known as conversation view (where you only have a
single thread of messages rather than a tree view like one sees on this
website or reddit).

~~~
softwaredoug
I agree on quoting. I think my problem is slacks product design isn’t very
opinionated. There are many ways of calling back to an earlier conversation,
but slack users don’t really have guidance on what they should do. So
conversations past a few interactions get hard to connect together, continue,
and discover.

Flowdock does a pretty good job of threaded communication. But Flowdock is
pretty feature sparse and barely functioning mobile experience.

------
dmitriid
> Hopefully open standards will improve enough so that people who are not tech
> savvy are able to use them in the future.

The problem is not standards. The problem is apps.

Jabber has been an open standard for god knows how long. Its standard slowly
caught up to the modern world of mobile phones and multiple devices [1]. The
apps? Not so much.

One of the appeals of Slack is that you have the same functionality across all
your OSes and devices (and there’s quite a lot of functionality).

[1] [https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html](https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html)

------
koalalorenzo
Why not [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org) ?

~~~
EduardoBautista
Looks interesting but I admit I haven't really used it. Is its goal to
ultimately replace IRC?

~~~
Arathorn
Not necessarily to replace IRC but to provide a common protocol which can
bridge to IRC, Slack, XMPP etc.

Matrix provides free (free as in beer /and/ free as in speech) gateways to
Slack and IRC, so you could use it for your purpose here if you wanted.

------
rectalogic
I use a Slack plugin [1] for Textual IRC I wrote. It uses SlackKit [2] which
needs a bit of work.

[1]
[https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack](https://github.com/rectalogic/TextualSlack)
[2]
[https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit](https://github.com/SlackKit/SlackKit)

~~~
dorian-graph
Well done! Looking forward to trying it

------
oda
Or one can use bitlbee, which has been around forever and connects an IRC
client to anything that works with libpurple. The full list of what it works
with is here: [https://wiki.bitlbee.org/](https://wiki.bitlbee.org/)

Matterbridge seems interesting as well but I haven't had time to play with it
yet.
[https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge](https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge)

In view of those more-complete, non-proprietary solutions, you have to be a
chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge.

~~~
Aelius
> you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge

Or part of a network that doesn't want to issue generic API tokens to random
users. Since this irccloud is implemented as a specific app integration, if I
understand correctly this would be more appealing to administrators and
moderators.

------
newnewpdro
I used to stay in contact with a group of friends who now exclusively
communicate via slack, until slack eliminated the IRC gateway. Now I've lost
contact with that group, it's quite irritating.

Do any of the solutions mentioned here work well on low-bandwidth connections?
I'm limited to 128kbps, and slack via web is absolutely unusable.

Open to self-hosted bouncer/proxy solutions, but not interested in involving a
third party.

~~~
floatingatoll
If you have little bandwidth and lots of time (self-hosted anything implies
“yes”!) then you could easily check out a copy of SlackKit and write yourself
a tiny API client, or checkout any SlackKit-using app that has a sufficiently
acceptable feature set. There are lots (see other comments in this post) and
there was an ncurses one a while back too, so options abound. SlackKit would
no doubt benefit from your time and attention to it as well!

------
dehrmann
It's a bit of a shame that there isn't a company that offers corporate IRC
hosting with a client as rich as the Slack client.

~~~
Thaxll
Because IRC is old and badly designed. People keep talking about IRC but no
one want to go back there because it's just bad compare to Slack, there is no
history, no rich text, no integration what's so ever to anything recent.

~~~
jlarocco
I'm sorry, but Slack is garbage, and those complaints are silly.

Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a
terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool
or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do
that in IRC.

Rich text is over rated, and 99% of messages don't use it anyway. Believe it
or not nobody wants to see your silly gif, and they'd be just fine with :-)
instead of an emoji.

Integrating with IRC is also trivial because its a standardized open protocol
and there are a ton of tools available. It doesn't need a bunch of pre-fab
"integrations" because it's not using a dumb proprietary API.

But having an IT guy spend half a day properly setting up an IRC server is
hard and it doesn't have a crappy web UI by default, so lets all use Slack.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Rich text is over rated, and 99% of messages don't use it anyway. Believe it
> or not nobody wants to see your silly gif, and they'd be just fine with :-)
> instead of an emoji.

Many people here want to write about code in their chats so at the very least
want to have an option for monospacing parts of a message.

You’re being flippant pretending it’s about GIFs rather than a genuine use
case.

> using a dumb proprietary API

Why do you need to insult other people’s work like that?

~~~
jlarocco
> Many people here want to write about code in their chats so at the very
> least want to have an option for monospacing parts of a message.

Fair enough, but I would still argue that if somebody's posting enough code
for that to matter, a link to a pastebin or a Github Gist, with syntax
highlighting, is a better solution.

> Why do you need to insult other people’s work like that?

Because it's a poor choice to create a proprietary chat protocol because it
allows Slack to control what people can say and how they say it.

~~~
loeg
Creating the proprietary, unstable API protocol was a _great_ choice _for
Slack_ given they want to lock-in customers to their paid service. It's just a
poor choice for everyone else.

~~~
na85
So a business made a user hostile move that happens to also be a good business
decision. Why is that laudable? Why is this something worthy of praise? Why do
we like this product or company? Why is criticism of this product being
downmodded?

~~~
loeg
None of this is responsive to my comment; I didn't make any of those claims,
nor do I control the collective voting of HN users.

------
walrus01
I honestly don't see the point. If you want to use IRC for company internal
purposes with your coworkers, do it fully self hosted and with zero dependency
on external hosted anything. ircd-hybrid on debian is not rocket science to
set up.

------
loeg
weechat + wee-slack.py works quite well.

~~~
lscotte
Very well - [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-
slack/wee-slack)

I'm so used to using wee-slack that I try to use commands like "s/" when I use
the web browser interface (which doesn't work).

~~~
loeg
Heh, s/foo/bar/ is about the only Slack extension (vs ordinary IRC chat) I am
aware of in weechat. I'm sure others exist, just my use is extremely naive /
basic.

One thing I wish wee-slack had (and I haven't updated in months, so it may by
now) is the ability to download files attached to messages without opening the
URL to webslack. That, and occasionally silent failure to display long notes
attached to messages, are the only major hurdles I encounter with wee-slack on
a regular basis.

------
dig1
bitlbee[1] + slack-libpurple[2] will work with any IRC client.

[1] [https://www.bitlbee.org](https://www.bitlbee.org)

[2] [https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple](https://github.com/dylex/slack-
libpurple)

------
Endy
If only Discord was so simple.

------
jamestomasino
ctrl-f "wee-slack"... not found.

[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-
slack)

It works great!

------
SampleBourgeois
Use matterircd

------
Thristle
Relevent XKCD - [https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

~~~
throwaway_98554
IRC is still there while all the other fads are gone.

------
rhabarba
Has the Slack defense armada already found a good reason why an Electron-based
proprietary, vendor-locked-in US version of IRC is even worth a comment?

~~~
loeg
Man, I really don't like a lot of things about Slack, but this comment is over
the top. At least assume good faith on the part of people who like do Slack
and defend it. There are differences of personal opinion over which features
matter most, and it's valid for people to disagree with you. I happen to agree
with some of the implied criticisms in your second clause, but, please tone
down the tinfoil hat and aggression by a factor of 100.

