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The company that I currently work for is trying to migrate fromHipChat toSlack. Nothing is certain yet, but a move seems likely,and at the minimum I can say that we're evaluating Slack and I've gotten tocheck it out and play with it a bit.
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My always up-to-date WeeChat configuration (weechat-dev) - myweechat.md. @PowerSchill There's probably a better way (like really using the API) but you can do this way. WeeChat, the extensible chat client. Home About Documentation Download Scripts Development. 2016-11-04, xt. add a slack specific shortcode version 2, 2016-10-31, xt. some cleanup. ability replace incoming version 1, 2016-02-29, xt. initial version EMOJI CONVERSION SCRIPT.
The thing that is awesome about Slack is that it has a native IRC gateway. Ifyou use the IRC gateway you don't get all of the whiz-bang features that thenative client has, but at least the IRC gateway basically works and is supportedby the company. This is a huge contrast to HipChat where the only way to get itworking with IRC is usingBitlBee which uses the XMPPgateway that HipChat supports and BitlBee itself acts as a bizarre XMPP/IRCbridge that maps the weird HipChat XMPP extensions into things that are sort oflike IRC. The BitlBee HipChat stuff mostly works and has been pretty solid forme for about a year now, but it definitely has some quirks and is really strangeto use in a lot of ways.
I live and die by IRC, so for me the native gateway is a huge, huge win. Thereare already a few quirks I've found (e.g. no scrollback when joining a newroom), but all in all the experience is miles ahead of using BitlBee withHipChat.
Here's why the IRC gateway is a huge win for me. Most of the same is true withHipChat + BitlBee; this is more a commentary on using an IRC client to connectto these newfangled chat systems than anything else.
First of all, like most serious IRC users I have an IRC session connected usingWeeChat running in an always-runningtmux session that's on a remote server that I veryrarely power cycle (every few months to make sure I stay on top of kernelupdates). This isn't the only way to do it, Irssi isanother great terminal-based IRC client, andGNU Screen is getting a bit long in thetooth but there's nothing wrong with it at all. There are numerous other IRCclients worthy of praise, WeeChat is just the one I prefer.
The reason this is cool is that I'm always connected to the chat system, so Iget chats from people all the time and can respond to them at my leisure. It canbe a bit annoying to other people who can't tell if I'm actually on or am justidling, but if anything I'll chalk that up as a plus. If anyone really needsto contact me, I have my phone number in a million places including inPagerDuty so I'm not too concerned about that.
Second of all, WeeChat (and most other IRC clients) is incredibly customizable,and it's easy to filter our messages I don't care about, get highlights onarbitrary words, and a number of other features that are must-have for me.Buffer management in WeeChat is really amazing and incredibly fast once you takethe time to learn how it works. I can easily handle really busy times on chatbetter than my coworkers using the native clients. Onenote edge app. There are a million plugins(and actually I'm not using any of them), but if you really want to get downthat rabbithole it's an option. WeeChat is also scriptable in a bunch ofdifferent languages including Python (my main day job programming language). Ihave dabbled in WeeChat scripting a bit and while I'm by no means a pro, it'spretty easy to get started and do cool things. I might write a blog post aboutthis once I've written a more substantial WeeChat plugin.
![Weechat Slack Weechat Slack](/uploads/1/1/9/8/119846850/675712433.png)
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Being able to keep client-side logs is also a godsend. There are a million timeswhere I've wanted to find something from my chat history---potentially months(or even years) old, and being able to simply grep the chat logs is awesome. Inthe same way that it's common to quote from emails when replying, from time totime I've found it incredibly useful to be able to quote from chat conversationse.g. to substantiate timelines that were discussed or the division ofresponsibility for projects. I've also had a lot of fun doing statisticalanalyses of my conversations (e.g. what proportion of the messages come from mev.s. from person X) and training Markov chain bots on chat logs.
Weechat Irc Slack
There is one serious downside which is that given someone's real name I don'tknow how to look up their nick/alias. For instance, suppose someone tells me Ineed to talk to Aubrey Graham about a project, but he cleverly set his nick tobe
drizzy
. I can use /whois drizzy
to figure out that drizzy
is AubreyGraham, but just given the name Aubrey Graham I'm not sure how to figure outthat his nick is drizzy
.Weechat Slack App
One more thing. If you want to use the Slack IRC gateway, I highly recommendCalle Erlandsson's excellent articleon the topic where he goes into a lot more details about various configurationthings and the plugins available.