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Comment by PrimeDirective | Hacker News Reader

How is this better than the official web client and why would I use it? It's not really "native", either.

I would guess it uses less memory: it claims generally <100MB, although in my opinion that's still a ridiculous amount of memory for a desktop IM client to use. Still, it's better than 800MB.

Meanwhile weechat w/wee-slack is lightweight. I do miss a richer (g)ui though - the standard console setup tends to break urls. And I haven't figured out if weechat supports soft line endings for eg: posting code snippets as a single (slack) message.

Maybe at some point I'll find the time to revisit qweechat and see if it might be possible to strike a better middleground between "it's just chat" and all the fluff slack adds.

Are threads still all over the place in wee-slack ? Last time I used it was impossible to follow a channel with multiple threads going on, let alone reply to one.

Fwiw i think threads are all over the place in slack (for Web) too. That said, a thread can be moved "out" to a buffer, and you can apparently rename them if you want/need to:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/blob/master/README.md...

Still sucks, but better than the Web client IMNHO.

A bit off topic but yes, these days "native" apps tend to be memory hogs. Modern computers have tons of CPU and memory which makes the developers lazy, it would seem. Generally, noone optimizes their desktop clients.

Telegram is amazingly smooth on Linux and Windows.

Because it has a real native backend. It uses Qt/C++. I really wish other chat apps would do it...

I've had Telegram, Slack and Discord open all day. Currently, they're using: 7MB Telegram, 350MB Slack, and 140MB Discord. Other heavy things I've got running are 160MB Spotify (which is electron) and 1GB Firefox (which is doing actual work with its memory).

800MB? Is that for the Linux or Windows client? My mac client is consuming 77.0MB per activity monitor. Which I assume on Mac is power of 10, so 73.4MiB.

That is probably the main process. Slack has one process per team. I am currently running at 1.4GB on my Mac with 6 (relatively small) teams.

It can be not native and still lighter-weight than electron

It's faster

Perhaps it might show you not only new messages across your workplaces, but also a way to actually read those new messages without loading (and waaaaaiting) each one and hunting for them.

Don't know if it does this, just complaining about the official client on Windows.

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