Comment by darkcl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkcl | Hacker News Reader

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I have contacted them, and they replied me with this

Lucas (Slack) Nov 20, 9:15 PM PST

Hi there,

Thank you for taking the time to write in and provide this feedback. I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering.

We are committed to doing what we can to improve the new experience for you, and will continue to make improvements to the new editor. If there are any specific examples of how these changes are impacting your daily work, please let me know. The more detail you can share about your experience, the better we can understand how to keep making it better.

Regards,

Lucas.

Anyone know how to reverse engineer Slack desktop client?

You should point out how blatantly contradictory these two sentences are...

Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users

disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering

...unless their goal is to reduce "all Slack users" to "only those who don't need the option"...

It's particularly amusing/frustrating/enraging because they have already shown that it's possible! Up until today, I've had some workspaces with the old (and functional!) text entry, and some with the new one — in the same app!

See also : disabling their IRC gateway.

> We are committed to doing what we can to improve the new experience for you

What an insincere message.

If they were committed, they’d offer the option. They don’t want to and that’s their right, but implying they value feedback and just doing what they want is throwing sand in the user’s eyes.

The fact that we _still_ can't disable the drafts "feature" says a lot about how little they listen to user feedback. I've not found a single person who likes that behavior, the behavior doesn't make any sense. There is a good reason almost literally every other chat app with a similar feature simply uses color/icons to indicate the same thing.

slack --inspect=4444 //will let ya connect to main electron process via chrome remote debug

Then run this

require('electron').BrowserWindow.getAllWindows()[0].webContents.executeJavaScript(` javascript:(_ => { const redux = slackDebug[slackDebug.activeTeamId].redux; const {wysiwyg_composer, wysiwyg_composer_ios, wysiwyg_composer_webapp, ...payload} = redux.getState().experiments; redux.dispatch({ type: '[19] Bulk add experiment assignments to redux', payload }); })(); `)

to disable rich text editor. Going to hack together a node launch script for slack here in a little bit :P

Thanks a lot, I need this

There's always alternative clients. Ripcord ( https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ ) is not 100% there yet, but it's definitely usable, tiny, and gets out of the way.

I couldn't figure out how to select a portion of a message and copy it. My only option was to copy the whole message. Made it a bit of a PITA. This is working better: https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet

(not my code)

Boy they can fuck right off with that corporate doublespeak bullshit.

Commitment to users means respecting that people have different preferences, and options let you respect that.

What they're really saying here is "We're ditching the users that got us here for the ones that we're targeting. They generally don't know shit but it's a market we haven't captured yet and that's all we care about"

Why can I only upvote once ?

There's Mattermost[1], which is an open source alternative to Slack. I haven't tried it yet so can't vouch for how it compares.

[1] https://mattermost.com

I had a lot of issues with mattermost delivering messages out of order and constantly getting disconnected with “retry” on lots of messages.

Not saying you’ll have the same issues, but definitely turned me off. :/

Mattermost CEO here,

Hi Dijit,

Highly appreciate the feedback. Definitely want you to have an amazing experience on Mattermost, and I'm sorry you're having issues.

If you go to "About" can you see which build you're running, whether it's a stable or unstable release?

Odd number releases are stable "Quality Releases", e.g. 5.17, even number releases are unstable "Feature" releases, e.g. 5.16.

Also, we probably need to add more diagnostics into our clients, as some issues come from how people choose to deploy the backend server.

> Odd number releases are stable [...], even number releases are unstable

Well, that's odd !

Frustrating to get such a definitive “not going to change it” response like that. At least with a company like Google they wouldn’t even bother responding. Why even bother offering to accept feedback if they’re not willing to take it to heart? Maybe it’s just an attempt to placate their users. I don’t see why they would have an issue offering some type of preference setting or inline selection for this. What would be the harm in allowing users to so choose?

Seems like it’s becoming another dark pattern whereby developers are forcing their decisions on users a la Chrome not allowing developers to disable the browsers built-in autofill.

Spotify were also definitely not going to bring the Android widget back after removing it. A storm of complaints and cancellations - including mine - later and they changed their minds.

I found other options in the mean time; I didn't resubscribe my 10 year old family sub.

There won't be the same amount of choice re Slack..

Ah, it's like I could see it coming :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694978

> Anyone know how to reverse engineer Slack desktop client?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21593098

I've been using wee_slack.py for some time; if you can add an application token and prefer the weechat UI then it's an appreciable option, but the issues I've had regarding inputting code are not necessarily fixed there since weechat doesn't take multi-line input. :(

Sure it does: /edit (opens $EDITOR, in my case neovim).

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

TIL, that's amazing! :D

EDIT: Turns out, I spoke too soon, there is no such option according to docs or from reading the code, maybe you have another plugin doing this?

EDIT2: found it: https://github.com/keith/edit-weechat

Whoops, sorry about that. I'll have to double check I was 90% that was standard in weechat or wee-slack - I've installed very few non-standard plug-ins.

I received the exact same reply. I suppose by the time you have a canned response for a complaint you should probably realize something was a bad idea.

https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

Sent an email this morning. Will update if I get a response.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com