slack-libpurple VS icyque

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.

I still use Pidgin regularly to this very day. Of course I only really use it for XMPP, but I did actually configure it to connect to my old ICQ account a while back. Unfortunately is seems to have quit working sometime or other. Think I'm being bit by this:

https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27

No big loss, I think there was like 1 other person in my ICQ contacts list that was still showing as online every now and then. Still, it's a neat nostalgia indulgence to connect to ICQ after all these years...