Slack client for the terminal

* I recognize your sarcasm, but figured I'd reply anyway since the internet is a weird place and lots of people might not catch the joke.

[1] https://medium.com/@matt.at.ably/wheres-all-my-cpu-and-memor...

Literally no one knows! It's layers upon layers of code. Most of the layers can't even be understood by a single person, let alone the whole program.

[1] https://electronjs.org/

That's still a lot of RAM for a chat with giant emojis.

You have to consider that people reporting these issues with memory consumption are running the app in different operating system than yours. Maybe your system is optimized. I just checked my co-workers computer and his main Slack process is at +97MB but there are 3 instances of "Slack Helper" at +433MB, +297MB and +255MB respectively. That's over 1GB in total. So either you are just looking at the main Slack process (which at +340MB makes sense) or your Slack is leaking memory somewhere that your RAM monitor is not able to map.

That's fucking bonkers. Objectively and scientifically fucking bonkers.

Especially for this application, which presents a UI from 1990, and the functionality of an IRC client.

I'm currently on a 16GB machine, where I only have a terminal, a text editor and a browser with few (<10) mild (wikipedia, hn, ...) tabs open. That gives 351 processes using a total of 8.7GB memory (2.11GB of which is unswappable, and about 1 gig of already compressed memory). My 3GB of disk caches go on top of that, and 0.5GB has already been swapped out.

I sure have room for a 20MB binary right now. However, on an 8GB system, I'd be in the red. I would already be swapping several GB, and any allocation would either evict (useful!) caches or swap out the memory of another process.

Any memory allocated in that state reduces the performance of some other component of the system.

Of course, 20MB is much better than the status-quo of casually burning a few hundred MB (or even a few GB) for simple tasks, and the situation of being out of memory with a whopping 8GB is caused primarily by the other "bad citizens", but the point here is that 20MB is indeed a quite big chunk of memory in real-world use-cases.

glances at watch

Why do I have to sign up for different Slack organizations and have a different password for each one?

Why can't I private message someone on Slack with just a username?

I think Discord does this much better.

About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems.

Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improve it didn't properly start until Slack and friends simultaneously re-cooked and ate everyone's lunch and dinner.

And slack is complete garbage that is pushed and we as employees most of the time have no other options.

Besides the whole problems mostly talked about related to memory and cpu usage, the one nobody seems to check or understand is that it is completely frustrating and unusable from accessibility point of view. I've seen this first hand as that person above is blind and the slack application is of one the worst offenders there is regarding this point. I've seen and felt his frustration and how slack team manages to avoid his point all the time.

So I hope it dies out eventually :D

- Huge, rigid, unskinnable UI. - Difficult, multi-step access to configurations and settings. - No OS integration therefore no desktop automation.

I probably should have stuck with Hipchat, but I jumped on the Slack bandwagon along with everyone else.

An open protocol, free choice of clients, and decentralised infrastructure is a baseline. A change is not an improvement if it removes those. (You could argue you have valid reasons to remove any of them and you'd be wrong.)

I don't see why it would be much more exhausting to use a hosted IRC service like IRCCloud to solve your problems than pick a specific alternative protocol entirely.

Clicking through to oilshell - I wanted to know what is different and exciting about it, but all I found was text saying it's "new". Making the value proposition clearer would go a long way and be a big help to people who are curious and geniunely want to understand what's amazing about your creation.. !

> The lack of conversations/threading is really annoying.

Slack is arguably worse - they recently added threading (really comments that can go on a post - there is no nesting), but this has made me much more likely to miss any follow-up because messages are less visible than otherwise.

> By default there seems to be a lot of leave/join spam. I used IRC for a year before turning this off and it vastly improved my experience.

This is entirely client dependent, so not really a fault of IRC. Slack has the same option, it just defaults to not displaying it like clients as opposed to whatever IRC client you used.

> I think most clients don't save anything by default. When I reboot my computer and don't log in again, I miss messages.

Yes. I don't know the inner workings, but generally if you're offline on IRC you will miss anything directed at you. Slack definitely addresses this, and it is my favorite "feature" - it means that Slack is not good for only casual discussions. (Slack's search is my second fav, and there's nothing special about that, it just works well enough that I can usually find that comment I vaguely recall someone making within the last 6 months on one of the many channels I'm on).

I expect this is largely a client issue, though I also imagine that most IRC servers have a very limited amount of immediately available conversation. Remembering that you have direct messages waiting for you would require servers that reserve nicks. That's all guessing though.

- Having to use pastebins for code is annoying.

Slack allows for posting code in text, posting text "snippets" that can include code, and posting files that can be downloaded.

Overall your frustrations seem very reasonable, but from the sound of it you're "hanging out" on IRC channels that are being friendly for outside users to drop in and out, and for devs to have conversations that are considered temporary. Plus not having users post goatse pics or worse. Which means they aren't even TRYING to accomplish what you want. Hard to blame IRC in that case - those features aren't used even when available.

I'm not exactly saying "You just need to use IRC client X" as you predicted, but more "you probably just need to change a config and connect to IRC servers that are INTENDED to do what you want". Not wanting to go through that effort is fine, and I'm not saying Slack and other alternatives are worse or even equal for those tasks, but don't blame the plane for not flying when the pilot is making donuts on the runway.

I find it interesting that people want to have threaded conversations in what is essentially a synchronous chat, but they prefer to have a degraded threading experience in their email client by using conversation view rather than traditional email threading using the Reply-To and/or References headers.

I actually do use this, but it is missing a lot of useful features, some of which seem unimplementable in IRC

One example: the mattermost clients won't register a message as "read" until you switch to that view, so if e.g. I check messages on my phone, I will see unread messages, but IRC doesn't have a way of communicating this between client and server so matterircd seems to mark all messages as "read" with mattermost)