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Comment by llampx | Hacker News Reader

I've given up entirely on the Slack desktop app and use Ripcord exclusively. Much faster, more responsive and easier to use for 99% of my time spent on slack.

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Pah. Next you'll tell us that once Ripcord shows you some messages, its "N new messages in this chat" notification actually goes away. Now that would be a killer feature, if Slack managed to implement it.

It’s heartening to see I’m not the only one with this problem, and also incredibly depressing.

The speed difference between Ripcord and Slack is just night and day. I had forgotten applications can respond faster than I can type, yet here we are.

My main complaint about Ripcord is that it's non-FOSS, which is somewhat concerning to me (the price is a non-issue; I'd be happy to pay the $20 if that comes with source code access). Sure, Slack itself ain't FOSS either, but I'm more inclined to make it as FOSS as possible (e.g. via Rambox or in an actual browser like Firefox) than to switch clients.

It also doesn't seem to acknowledge my starred channels; while the bookmarks are better anyway, those don't carry over to my phone or my other computers.

I just tested ripcord and it didn't seem to work very well on Gnome. Didn't do dpi scaling so it looked tiny on my main monitor and the notifications showed up pretty broken.

There's some things you could try listed on this page: https://dev.cancel.fm/wiki?name=Linux_DPI_Problems

Gnome should probably have the correct DPI values, since it's a complete DE, but I'm guessing something has gone wrong with the way the Qt version that Ripcord uses is reading the DPI values.

Try something like:

    QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 ./Ripcord.AppImage

It would be better if this always worked out-of-the-box 100% of the time, but Linux desktop environments are quite varied and it's hard to handle every case while also not limiting support to specific desktop environments and versions.

I'm giving this a whirl now. I can't stand forced WYSIWYG and I know this minor annoyance is going to slowly grind on me over time.

I just checked the screenshot. It reminds me of Windows 95. What I feel like one app can't fit all. Some people want a faster response time rather than a modern design and vice-versa.

Talking about slack new input box. The non-technical person would be more than happy with it. Because they don't know markdown and something that works like MS Word is good enough.

Consider my interests piqued. I shall be giving ripcord a go from tomorrow.

Sadly they aren't going to implement some of my most used features from slack in ripcord so I stopped using it. Was ready to pay a ton of money to the dev as well.

As a current slack user, could you give a couple examples?

You can see what he plans on implementing here. https://dev.cancel.fm/wiki?name=ServiceFeatures

For me it was the video chat and voice chat though it seems he changed his tune on voice, as the last time I checked it was a 'Never'.

How is voice chat on Slack working in Ripcord? I'm guessing not at all?

Says works for Discord and WIP for Slack.

Under "Features" it says it's a WIP (so yes, probably not working at all):

> Voice chat (Discord OK, Slack WIP)

It also lists this 'feature' which I think is hilarious:

> Not made from a web browser

So Ripcord is making money on illegal thing? Discord / Slack ToS forbids third party app afaik.

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...

From the official Slack API docs site,

https://api.slack.com/community

we find

"terminal-slack - Terminal client for Slack"

"Slacker - Simple Slack client for the CLI"

"scudcloud - Ubuntu client for Slack"

I'm pretty sure there are others in that list which are also standalone thirdparty clients, but clearly they would not be listing those on their own site and providing plenty of API docs if they forbid them.

https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/terms-of-service/api

"(D) attempt to reverse engineer or otherwise derive source code, trade secrets, or know-how of our APIs or Services;"

I'm pretty sure the voice feature is not part of the public API.

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