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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

My only question is, which Slack alternative does not use half my CPUs and suck down my battery just to run ideally in the background?

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This was the response I got from Slack 9 months ago when I asked them about this. I get 30% cpu burn if i close the slack window with a animated gif in it

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Hi Sean,

Thanks for getting in touch with your feedback. This is something which I actually raised with our engineering team the other day and it's something we have discussed in depth. For now, we don't actually have any way of knowing when the app is minimized from the webapp portion of your app. Because of this, the gifs do not stop running when the app is minimized. We are considering our options here though and looking into what we could do in the future to improve this behavior.

If there is anything else that I can help you with in the meantime, please do let me know.

Best regards,

That's weird, because Electron's BrowserWindow class emits a few events which should make this possible: 'minimize', 'hide', etc...

https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/browser-window/#event-hide

It’s not slack but electron.

We’ve been floating the idea of developing a native client for slack (we have experience in this field, having developed a Windows client for iMessage) but haven’t decided if it would be worth our while.

VS Code is also Electron and it uses way less CPU and battery life for a significantly more complex task.

Across the board false. Slack is working to reduce the footprint. Listen to the Software Engineering Daily [0] podcast about it (performance conversation begins around 38:45)

[0] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/08/11/typescript-a...

Try out eul:

https://eul.im

It'a native desktop client for Skype, Slack, and many others. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.

What is the tech behind these clients? At 4-8mb it clearly isn't Electron. Are you writing native apps for three platforms?

Yes, it's native. It's written in Go.

Most IRC clients

Can you recommend an IRC client that works for non-technical folks that also works with api and webhooks capabilities?

That seems to be a project waiting to be written. It's clear that IRC can be good enough but slack wins because of the smooth on-boarding for non-technical people.

I guess noone has built it because for techies, IRC is good enough, and there isn't a clear path to monetizing it?

The Lounge works rather nicely for non technical people, https://github.com/thelounge/lounge

ScoutLink uses it for kids with great success.

If you are going to write a new client for a chat protocol, why use IRC over Matrix, especially since Matrix bridges to IRC?

irccloud.com - always on. never lose history.

what webhooks/api would you like?

I'm to the point now where I just leave the Slack web client open as a tab in Chrome. It works well for me and I still get notifications when I need them.

The best part is I can use the back button to go to previously viewed rooms/messages.

correction: idly in the background.

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