Show HN: Lechat – team chat for developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lechat – team chat for developers

lechat.im

34 pointsQwl45 comments

We're a team of five (two work remotely) at Citybot -- Lechat works very well for us. History is always there, no ridiculous kissing smiley faces (hello Skype), no ridiculous out of sync notifications that are months old (hello Skype). We've been beta testing it for about a month and it's been making our lives easier and communication clearer. The support is right on. The speed with which the Lechat team adds useful features is phenomenal. Never at expense of quality. Would love to see the native clients, and they say they're coming soon. I absolutely totally recommend it. Try it out!

Still no features that I don't have in IRC+emacs. Except for the code highlighter/formatting which is ok, but not enough.

Fair point, but you try and get a whole company to use IRC+emacs ;) Not gonna happen.

The first company I worked for did everything on IRC. They were also by far the most successful company I've worked for. Coincidence?

Sure, and I still use IRC every day. But IRC+emacs is going to be a tiny fraction of the world, saying "this product is useless because there is an advanced alternative" is like saying "Oh, why would anyone ever want to fly commercial, it's so much easier and more fun to build and fly your own airplane".

emacs was just my example, but there are tens of IRC clients, from web clients to GUIs to android apps. Everyone can find a client they can easily used.

We have a pretty small team and use IRC pretty heavily. Works great and integrates with our internal github as well.

What about search + multiple chat windows on same screen?

I can search an emacs IRC buffer (it's just like searching a text file) or if I want to search everything I can just grep in my logs directory and get search results in emacs which I can then grep some more or easily copy paste to another buffer where I have a file open or a colleague who I'm chatting with.

For multiple windows, I can split my emacs in however many windows I want horizontally and vertically and switch around with whatever key bindings I want.

we even have our marketing guy use lechat. Try making your marketing use emacs ;)

The finance team at appnexus use ipython internally to scrape files, create aggregates, etc.

I dunno, it's just about teaching them about it at the right level. Don't swamp them with thousands of details, and don't leave them without a lifeline to call upon.

Although this is assuming they are a bit open-minded.

The finance team at appnexus use ipython internally to scrape files, create aggregates, etc.

I dunno, it's just about teaching them about it at the right level. Don't swamp them with thousands of details, and don't leave them without a lifeline to call upon.

Although this is assuming they want to be competent.

only problem with that is to find someone else who knows what emacs and irc are and how to use it, but anyone can use web-app or mobile-app.

word

Does this work with XMPP? Also, any chance of Pivotal Tracker integration? I've tried HipChat, Jaconda, Hall, Skype, etc... still trying to find something that works well for our team at Getaround.

Does not work with XMPP. We're opting for high-quality native clients for everything (coming soon).

But you're chat for developers! You're never going to be able to offer the level of customization people get out of Adium/Messages/their chat client of choice.

Facebook took this approach with Facebook Chat but eventually offered XMPP. Curious to hear what value you think the native client approach would offer.

We just want a nicer HipChat, that's all.

OK. I wish you luck. HipChat uses XMPP, by the way. http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-ja...

Hi there. We'll integrate with Pivotal Tracker - we're sort of implementing integrations on demand.

The fake names are disconcerting for a product that will handle sensitive information (chats).

(edit: unless 2 co-founders are genuinely named Bob Smith and John Doe, in which case maybe consider changing your names :p)

Theese guys are really serious about ninjitzu. See Robert Smith here: http://www.whois.com/whois/lechat.im

Sorry. We'll put up our real names soon. We're legit though, I swear!

I kind of wish those were our real names, would be awesome.

We have a distributed team of 4 engineers in 3 different locations. We have been using lechat.im for the last month and it has improved the information flow dramatically. Before lechat.im we tried hangouts, Skype and gTalk and those all fall short of the features that matter for a distributed team. Things that I love about lechat: search, SVN and git hooks (checking go into a separate room as messages), notifications, chat history.

We've been using lechat for the last few weeks and we are very happy with it. The UI is simple and clean. Fast history search is the killer feature for us. A number of nice UI details really show that this chat was developed by developers for developers.

Are your chat logs encrypted and suitably protected? Losing your chat logs could be very damaging for a company - knowing that logs are safe is a required feature for us.

Yes. Encrypted filesystem, continuous encrypted backups.

That should be in the list of features on home page.

Nice. I was at first very confused about the support room chat, thought it was just a page to help you get started. Turns out it's a support chat for the app.

Very nice though.

any plans to let us own our data - as in a hosted offering? The idea of my teams chats being owned only by me appeals

Yeah, we're working on an appliance version of the product.

Looks clean and simple. What's your backend infrastructure? Didn't see much technical detail in the FAQ :)

Thanks! Erlang + websockets + Postgres

Neat. My friends and I switched from ejabberd to Prosody[1], a Lua XMPP server; Lua is quite a bit easier to use than Erlang (unless you are already an Erlang grandwizard), so writing new plugins is a breeze with prosody. Of course, ejabberd already has a lot of plugins written, so lots of benefits there as well.

Good luck! Hosted xmpp could be executed really well.

[1] http://prosody.im/

What are you using for full-text search, anything unusual or just postgres built-in search?

I can also see nginx from http headers.

True. nginx as well.

Looks cool, let me try it with our distributed team (shanghai and bangalore) - 7 people team.

Great job, guys! Lechat is surprisingly powerful despite its lightweight and simple ui.

Like the pricing page. Simple.

Guys, make a twitter account so we can easily catch on with the updates.

http://twitter.com/lechat_im

We'll link to it from the site soon.

Love the pricing page.

btw, I recommend you change the code font-face order of

    Monaco,Menlo,Consolas,"Courier New",monospace;

    Menlo,Consolas,Monaco,"Courier New",monospace;

this way the nicer system-specific fonts will actually work, right now everything gets rendered in Monaco since it's universally available, and the nicer fonts are never used.

Also, maybe pick a more contrasting scheme for the syntax highlighting in code, right now it's very nearly indistinguishable from plaintext...

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