slack-libpurple VS wee-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.

I replaced the Slack client with wee-slack [https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack]. It brings a much more "zen" experience to using Slack and better compliments my keyboard-centric desktop/workflow (e.g. clear all unread channel notifications? keybind! Jump between all the high priority/@mentioned notifications? keybind!) It also helps if you're expected to be available via Slack, since it can keep you showing "green" while you've actually been ignoring it.

Fwiw, last time I looked, wee-slack was a decent improvement for slack text chat. These days maybe a matrix bridge?

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

> - My company uses Slack's enterprise auth, and all the CLI slack clients I could find haven't been updated in years and no longer work.

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack is decent.

> - The web is using more javascript than in the past.

cli browsers are probably the only truly unrealistic thing. An idea that I've been kicking around for a while is to build a simple CLI "browser" that uses PhantomJS or similar under the hood to request, load, and render the page into an image, convert the image to sixel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel) and display it that way (or use any of the various terminal emulator-specific features (KiTTY has https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ for example)). Probably pretty clunky, but it's doable if you're in the mood to write something purely for fun.

> - Mutt doesn't handle multiple email accounts natively for work/personal. The solutions are hacks at best. Email servers are starting to use more complete auth mechanisms that don't work well with mutt.

I don't think they're hacks. You can define exactly how you want it to work. That's a feature, not a bug. Sure, it takes a little bit of work to set up but you can use https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/tree/master/.config/mut... as a starting point if you'd like.

It has been unable to log in for the last year: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/844

When the IRC gateway stopped working, I found https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack worked pretty well. But I switched employers months ago and no longer have to use Slack, which is even better! (So, I don't know how well it works today.)

The weechat plugin unfortunately cannot coexist with wee-slack (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/812, https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/issues/248), so if one wants to participate in the Haskell Foundation Slack, or any other Slack (e.g. for work), then Matrix is off limits. Yeah, it's just a bug that will eventually get fixed, but it does make things unnecessarily complicated. :-/

Not really Vim but there is a plugin for WeeChat: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

NB. On integrating slack & other webby things. Terminal applications might be a big help here (the Windows terminal now has excellent compatibility if you’re using Windows). For instance, there’s a slack plugin for weechat (a terminal IRC / chat client) which by all accounts works pretty well. Or there’s this client that runs directly in a terminal.

Wee-Slack is a WeeChat plugin that is based on python WebSockets and delivers most of the basic functionality of the Slack client. To use this, you need to receive a Slack API token. One way is - after installing - to run on WeeChat: /slack register This command prints a link you should open in your browser to authorize WeeChat with Slack. Once you’ve accomplished this, you should run: