Hacker News Reader

Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

It looks nice, but if you plan to try it as you default Slack client be aware it is lacking many features:

- Edit posted messages (big one, TBA) - Authentication w/ XOXC tokens - Loading older messages - Typing indicators - Starring & Pinning things - Search - Sharing messages - Screensharing and Calls (aka Screenhero) - Joining and creating channels

View on HN

Yeah, but multiple windows! OMG!

I find managing multiple conversations with Slack so incredibly challenging. Having multiple windows open for active conversations is sooo good.

That's interesting. I find managing Teams' multiple windows cumbersome and confusing, but find Slack very natural and efficient.

Do you end up sending messages in the wrong chat often? Or missing messages or both? What do the main frustrations of a single window setup look like?

I lose stuff all the time when I switch between conversations and channels.

try the back button to jump back to where you were before

I just navigate Slack entirely by search and redirect all conversations to public channel as as much as possible, and I find that pretty natural. CTRL+K to navigate between convos and channels, CTRL+F to find things based on content (if I don't want to think about whether something was in a DM or a channel, and just go back to the same one).

> Do you end up sending messages in the wrong chat often?

Yup. It’s probably my most frequent mistake (and can be embarrassing). I make the same mistake with messages.

What I have done to mitigate the issue, is give each workspace a different color theme. At least, it helps me to avoid crosstalk between organizations.

I’m not a “native slacker,” so I’m probably not a particularly good candidate for a focus group.

> What I have done to mitigate the issue, is give each workspace a different color theme. At least, it helps me to avoid crosstalk between organizations.

Ok yeah the different workspaces in one window is more of a pain than just different channels and chats in one window for me, at least the way it's done in Slack. I haven't felt that way on IRC, for whatever reason.

On a Mac, Teams doesn't obey many of the user interface guidelines, so multi-window use is unintuitive and difficult.

Of course nothing in Mac Teams is nearly as bad as their incoming call notification - calls pop up under all your existing calendar/email/... notifications, which you have to furiously click away in order to answer the call.

That sounds ridiculously frustrating. Does Cmd + ` pull up the call? I'm guessing no since Teams go out of its way to make notifications un-native and clunky, but maybe worth a shot.

+1 It's painful to keep multiple active discussions in threads (or anywhere else for that matter).

+1, I basically go back to the DMs page all the time to find recent convos, that's the only way I found.

I'd love to have multiple windows. At some point in the last few months Slack broke the command-up/command-down shortcuts that would take you to the next conversation with an unread message -- if you restart it'll work for a short while and then break again. Having multiple windows would resolve this and other annoyances.

It's funny to see how basically all the official mainstream IM clients like AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. used to be 1-window-per-conversation, but then in some odd wave of "modernity" (for lack of a better term) that was all dispensed with, and then now, multiple windows is somehow heralded as a new feature again.

To me, it's just common sense that each conversation should be in its own window, instead of stuffing them all into one window that only shows one at a time.

There's another comment here about how Teams' multiple windows is confusing, but I think that's more to do with it being Teams than anything else; as I mentioned above, all IM clients were originally multiple-window and people certainly didn't have trouble using them.

Oh, this brings back lots of fun memories comparing developing SDI apps and MDI apps in Windows.

I remember when a lot of software had heaps of windows. Like graphics editing apps, logic, Final Cut etc. Been a huge cutting back on windows for apps.

Clients like Adium (on Mac OS) and Pidgin (elsewhere, but honestly nothing is as nice as Adium), had a great solution for this. A window with tabs, but you can just drag tabs out and have more than one window. Plus you could style messages client-side. Nice and easy, better than anything popular today.

Adium was everything an IM client should be. I wish it would return to relevance, but with the dominance of closed messaging protocols that seems unlikely at best.

We create the poison then drink it.

It’s more to do with having a unified experience with mobile - slack pretty much has the exact same UI on all devices (only change is whether the side bar is visible, which just depends on screen size). For better or worse, not judging here.

Slack is more like IRC and as I recall most IRC clients had single windows.

If you use a browser as your client, this can be done. No need for electron either :)

On Macos Chrome you can still do hamburger menu -> More Tools -> Create Shortcut... and enable "open as window", and Chrome will create a .app file that, when you run it, opens that site as a PWA. Additionally it gets the favicon of the site by default as its app icon (you can change that) and then it shows up in the cmd-tab list as an app completely separate from Chrome. This works really nicely with Slack, especially if you're usually only in a few slack teams. Inside the PWA Chrome apps you can do cmd-N to create a new window if you want to see multiple channels / threads side-by-side from the same slack team. It's a great user experience and pretty much the only reason I keep Chrome around.

Firefox devs removed its PWA / "site-specific browser" support in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593 .

There's a GitHub project that enables you to run PWA's with Firefox as distinct apps (with thier own icons etc): https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox.

Disclaimer: Haven't tried it out myself.

Thanks, that's interesting but I'm not so anti-Chrome that I'm going to use a "custom modified Firefox runtime" just for PWAs. I don't even use the above trick these days; I've gone back to just using Slack.app.

I frequently just use slack in the browser because it has tabs and windows. And generally performs much better.

Multiple windows <3

I look at the screenshots and think "we're living in the ~future~ 1996"!

I haven’t tried this but… if you use Slack in a browser can you open new tabs for conversations?

Oof, I feel like just one of those would be a deal breaker for most, but all those missing together makes it feel more like a proof of concept than anything else.

A $20 proof of concept.

Gotta start somewhere.

The problem is that according to the FAQ it's more in maintenance mode than in active development.

I would also expect the authors are going to have a hard time keeping up with Slack. One of Slack's goals in picking their architecture was to allow for experimentation, iteration, and expansion. Reverse-engineering an API inevitably means being behind. And given the number of engineers Slack has, it could well mean being further and further behind over time.

When you're building on someones platform, you take a risk. When you're actively integrating with a fast moving platform, you add more risk. When you build on a platform which doesn't want you there, you add even more.

When you're having to reverse engineer a platform to build something, you're asking for a special kind of hell.

Oof, while I highly value multiple windows - not sure I am ready to give up on some of the things you listed (especially edit & calls)

missing search is a non starter. "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge" rings true in my experience

Reply on news.ycombinator.com