slack-libpurple VS emacs-slack

Eion Robb has done an incredible amount of work in this space. His GitHub page[1] has tons of plugins, and I particularly appreciate the work he has done on the Matrix plugin to make it available to Windows users.

Lest you think this is less than cool because you don't use Pidgin, bitlbee[2] is a great tool to get slack (and others!) into your IRC client. I haven't run it myself, but I know that it heavily relies on purple[3] for its magic. I can tell it gets a lot of use, perusing the issues on the slack purple plugin[4] for example.

1: https://github.com/EionRobb?tab=repositories

2: https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html

3: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/

4: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple/issues?q=is%3Aissue...

Unpopular opinion number one: James is not that bad. At least it can do video calls properly which is not something I would say of Slack.

Unpopular opinion number two: pidgi was better and I don't why we all decided as an industry to go to these ridiculously heavy memory hog electron based clients. I use Slack from Pidgin to this day: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

Another alternative is combining bitlbee with slack-libpurple and using an emacs IRC client, such as the built-in ERC. I used this back when I wanted both Discord and Slack available in the same emacs.

It's not IRC, but there exists a working libpurple plugin that you just auth as with your normal user account:

https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

I just use it with Pidgin, but there are curses clients too (I'm aware of bitlbee, there are probably others) if you prefer the IRC-style experience.

Emacs (which can be run in the terminal using the "-nw" option) has a slack package -- I dipped my toes in and noped out quickly, as I found it too difficult and too ugly compared to using the app: https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack

I've tried to do the same thing: going completely text mode. For me, it was disastrous -- it was a big distraction for me at work, at two jobs. I even left a good job partially so that I could try to go text-mode rather than click my way through lots of GUIs. It was something of an obsession. Now I look back and sigh.

I love the focus the terminal brings, besides the solid benefit of scriptable and automation that’s not possible with most GUI apps.

I’ve recently rediscovered emacs and now use it as my primary tool for development. I already loved working in the terminal for git and xcodebuild so it’s felt natural.

Moving editing and workflow into emacs has been great so far. I’m already customizing things. Even using eshell! Excited to look into other things like a music player or email app. Or even slack [0] like the author!

[0]: https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack