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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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'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.

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

Multiple windows <3

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

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

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

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

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