Using Slack from the terminal

Posted on November 13, 2021

In rencent years, lot of my short conversations with my research lab has moved to Slack. I am not a big fan of closed protocol communication clients, but Slack has the advantage that it is relatively easy to use. Well, it seems that it relatively easy to use for everyone except me.

I started with the Slack desktop client, which was a resource hog. So, I switched to using Slack in the browser. But for the last week or so, Slack on the browser (Firefox) was becoming extremely unresponsive. So, I started looking at alternatives.

I tried a few different clients but was not impressed by any of the alternative GUIs. So, I started testing TUIs as well. There were two which seem to be reasonably well maintained:

I could not get wee-slack to work. The instructions were asking to install stuff in ~/.weechat/... but that did not work for me. slack-term looks decent and works well. I am going to use this post to collect some notes on how to improve the user experience with slack-term.

Use correct timezone

I decided to use the docker version of slack-term and one of the issues was that the timestamps associated with all messages were shown in UTC! It turns out that by default, docker images show time in UTC (rather, if you don’t set time zone on a linux machine, it assumes that the time zone is UTC). After a bit of duckduckgo-ing, I figured that I needed to add tzdata package to the docker file, and then pass the TZ argument to set the time-zone. So, I cloned the repo of slack-term and added the following patch:

diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index 4139c4a..0cc8d99 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -4,7 +4,8 @@ ENV PATH /go/bin:/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH
 ENV GOPATH /go
 
 RUN    apk add --no-cache \
-   ca-certificates
+ ca-certificates \
+    tzdata
 
 COPY . /go/src/github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term
 
@@ -26,6 +27,7 @@ FROM alpine:latest
 ENV USER root
 
 COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/slack-term /usr/bin/slack-term
+COPY --from=builder /usr/share/zoneinfo /usr/share/zoneinfo
 COPY --from=builder /etc/ssl/certs/ /etc/ssl/certs
 
 ENTRYPOINT stty cols 25 && slack-term -config config

Then I built the image using:

docket build . -t local/slack-term

And added the following aliases in my ~/.zshrc:

alias slack-org1="docker run -it -v /home/username/.config/slack-term/org1:/config -e TZ='America/New_York' local/slack-term"                      
alias slack-org2="docker run -it -v /home/username/.config/slack-term/org2:/config -e TZ='America/New_York' local/slack-term"

where org1 and org2 are two slack organizations that I am a part of. Now, the timezone is set correctly in the Docker image and slack-term shows the correct timestamps.

Slack GUIs allow you to share attachments, but that is not supported by slack-term. For me, a simple solution was to use Dropbox for sharing. Most of my files are on Dropbox. So, if I could easily generate a shareable Dropbox link, that I could just share that instead of sharing a file. Turn out, it is easy to get the link used by Dropbox for sharing files:

dropbox.py sharelink <filename>

gives the sharable link for the file. So, I simply added the following function to my ~/.zshrc file:

function dropbox-link() { dropbox.py sharelink "$1" | xclip -selection clipboard }

Now, I can just go to the directory with the file that I want to share, run dropbox-link <filename> and simply paste the link in slack-term.

Update: Going back to GUIs

I tested slack-term for about two months, but it was too cumbersome to use. Long messages were hard to read, the visual indicators were difficult to see, attachments were had to see, and so on. So, I decided to go back to GUI, this time with slack’s desktop client.

Now, back to actual work…

This entry was posted in CLI and tagged slack, slack-term.

Using Slack from the terminal

Use correct timezone

Sharing attachments

Update: Going back to GUIs