Show HN: Eul – a lightweight desktop client for Skype, Slack, Gmail, and more
eul.im
eul.im
eul is a very lightweight and fast native desktop client for Skype, Slack, Gmail, VK, FB, Jabber, Telegram, and Signal. Right now only the first four are supported, and the rest should be done by the end of August.
Why did I create this? To solve two big problems I see with the current IM solutions: there are too many of them, and the clients are ridiculously bloated for what they are built to do. For example, everyone knows what a huge resource hog the Skype client is. Even the Telegram client, which is supposed to be lightweight, is using 1.3 GB of RAM on my desktop right now.
I'm obsessed with performance. The entire application is about 4 MB, and it's never going to be more than 10 MB. In fact there are still many things to optimize. It's native, so you don't need to download a 100 MB browser just to use your IM client.
eul can display thousands of messages in one conversation without the constant page fetching. The scrolling is instant and smooth. You can jump to any message without waiting. I've tested it with 50 000 messages in one chat. No lags, instant scrolling to any point, instant search. That should be enough for most :)
This is a very early alpha release. A lot of essential features are still missing (for example, images and other attachments are not supported yet). Automatic updates will be released every day. There's a built in contact form, please use it to submit bugs and suggestions.
Looking forward to hearing your feedback :)
Thanks
So having a lightweight client is definitely appealing to me. However Slack keeps adding features often and every one using Slack assumes the recipient runs the same version of Slack as his.
I wonder how can your unofficial client can deal with this problem the next time Slack releases the next update that is as big as adding threaded conversations for example.
I came across the new threaded conversations yesterday, and they can be implemented in one or two days.
I will definitely be trying this out.
However a question essential for our pending use is: any plans to support HipChat? That would pretty near seal the deal for my current group.
Eul's target audience is primarily professionals, so it's silly of me to forget about HipChat. I just had a look at its API, and yes, it will absolutely be supported. In fact, most likely this is going to be the next protocol implemented.
Should be done by mid-August.
If it's at all possible, we'd love to have a build compatible back to macOS 10.10. Right now, it can only run on 10.12 and we work in a large enterprise where updates are withheld for mostly software-compatibility reasons (a lot of media software relies on older systems).
Will stay at the window for updates :)
- THANK YOU! It's near impossible to find a client that isn't either run in a console (admittedly not the worst problem) or horribly bloated (what the hell are people thinking when the bundle a browser to show a single page!?).
- What do you think of adding Matrix (https://matrix.org)? The protocol is HTTP + JSON based and well documented.
- Have you thought about open sourcing? My guess is either you want to sell this eventually or your coding standards are quite high and you doubt people can contribute too much while meeting them. In the case of the latter, I'd still like for it to be around, even if your standards for PRs would be too high for me to meet.
Of course, the same problem can happen for a multi protocol client as well, but at least it's not inherently impossible to solve it there.
Matrix will definitely be implemented at some point. Not within the first 2 months unfortunately.
Yes, my standards are pretty high, but like I said before here, I do consider open sourcing it.
> I'm obsessed with performance. The entire application is about 4 MB, and it's never going to be more than 10 MB. In fact there are still many things to optimize. It's native, so you don't need to download a 100 MB browser just to use your IM client.
Though I would think it would be similar to something like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
Thanks
- This is a native application, but does not use any native controls, so currently lacks text selection or navigation, tab to change input focus, or anything else you'd expect from a native application (apart from speed). One of the things that bothers me most about the Slack application is it's lack of interoperability with macOS, for example in drag and drop - this application does not appear to be targeting that interoperability either.
- Slack authentication doesn't appear to be working at the moment - it directs me to my browser to authenticate, but after doing that I'm left in the Slack web-app, not redirected back to the application.
Are you a member of multiple Slack orgs?
1. Are you planning to release this as open source? I really want this to have a native Cocoa interface on macOS.
2. When you say Gmail, do you mean email or Hangouts?
3. Where are you getting these APIs from?
When I get to work tomorrow I’ll be trying this out (knowing it’s in beta) for XMPP / Jabber, if it doesn’t already support OTR encryption - that’d be a killer feature. A big problem I see is that a lot of places want to or do run internal XMPP/Jabber because they have engineers working that don’t want to / can’t run ‘enterprise’ rubbish like Skype or those of us that are sick of JavaScript heavy SaaS apps like slack - but then you’ll have a few managers or project managers that still run Windows likely for excel or out of habit etc... and they have to use Pidgin - which while it works across a lot of IM systems - is very awkward and ugly as anything, so it gives the better protocols a bad name, on Mac there’s Adium which is a pretty decent multi-IM client but has stagnated somewhat. So a clean, easy to use, stable and well performing chat client that supports XMPP/Jabber with MUC and OTR would be an absolute killer.
I can't sign them at this point, but I will apply as soon as possible.
Right now macOS and Windows 10 complain about an unreliable executable (as they should).
Win32/Lineage[0] is a bit of malware (or perhaps a characteristic of malware) that steals credentials. It looks like other software has had false-positives for this before (i.e. optipng[1]). You can also submit eul as a false-positive here[2].
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...
[1]: https://github.com/madskristensen/WebEssentials2013/issues/5...
What technology & frameworks are used to create Eul?
Does Eul support being able to use multiple accounts of Telegram, Gmail, Skype etc?
Eul is a native desktop app built in Go. It has all your contacts in one place, it's much faster, and it uses an order of magnitude fewer resources.
Very good question about multiple accounts. Not right now, but it will be implemented very soon. This is going to be another unique advantage.
i wanted to do something like that, di you use something like nanovg o is from scratch?
have you considered doing a small tutorial/blog series, to explain how to do somethign similar or can you raccomend a resource to learning?
It's very basic right now (you can't even move a cursor with the mouse).
I will definitely write a couple of posts about this!
but i would not recommend using it
My company uses Slack, and I hate the iOS app, Windows app and the Linux app. It's bloated and slow!
I paid for the Mailbird app, and I'd pay for a fast and efficient Slack app too.
I'm running into some issues on my Linux machine with the login experience - I sent you an email with more details.
edit
Ah! I see it now. Went into spam for some reason.
Trojan:Win32/Spursint.F!cl
:(
Ideally yes, I'd like to implement it. It's a stable protocol that's not going to change, so there's not much cost in maintaining it.
What are you using IRC for?
Needing to know user /auth stuff happens by sending private messages to bots, and other insane hacks.
For now I guess you can only monitor the traffic with a tool like WireShark and see for yourself that eul only fetches current version for the autoupdates and submits error reports.
After that Viber and Discord most likely.
There are still a lot of crucial features I need to implement, but after eul is out of beta, Mattermost support should be there.
Thank you for your effort and I'm looking forward to using Eul quite a bit in the future. :)
There is no excuse for this - it is shoddy engineering. Sending text messages is a simple task. Ruining my battery life and performance for the sake of making it easier for the billion dollar company to ship a cross platform app which feels wrong on every platform is something I despise and I for one am extremely happy that people are trying to counter this ridiculous trend.
I'm going to work on signing the executables for all platforms.
I should get the code signing certificate by the end of the next week.
I have browsed Show HN every day for over a year now, and I can't think of any project that made me as excited as this (although https://github.com/google/xi-editor and https://github.com/limetext come close). I bet that almost every Go developer on HN would love to read, study and learn from his code, so how about we ask him nicely instead of attempting to attack his credibility in hope of pressuring him into releasing his source code..
His credibility is already at 0, because he's an anon.
> in hope of pressuring him into releasing his source code..
Not my hope, I don't even install official slack client because I don't trust it to be built by competent people (it's web app for me tyvm), my hope is that everybody who installed this software formats their hard drives for the sake of other people if not for themselves. How do you think things like this http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15316394/ happen?
EDIT:
> I can assure you
How? In a cursory attempt I couldn't find any meaningful statistics, but that wasn't my impression when reading topics like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038114.
Also, 5 hour old account. Weird. Don't install warez people.