slack-libpurple VS groupme-purple

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.

It took a while, but it's gotten pretty good again. Harder to get plugins running than it used to be, but now there's Slack, Matrix, Teams, and (shameless plug) GroupMe[1]. Works well enough for me these days :)

1: https://github.com/djhaskin987/groupme-purple . Kudos to its original author, Alyssa Rosenzweig :)