Slackadaisical

Introduction

Slackadaisical is a simple weekend project CLI interface to Slack. This is not a library and is not yet intended to be developed on top of. It's not even very good. This is just a simple, silly command line Slack client. But if you live in tmux or the command line like me, you might just like it.

Right now this is a goof project. But if the world loves it and wants to contribute to it, then I will maintain the app and make it a little more robust. Currently there's no testing, autoloading, no options, documentation, logging, or any niceties that a real app should enjoy. I will build those things if the project ends up warranting it, and that's all up to you.

Installation

Fastest version:

$ echo "YOUR_SLACK_API_USER_TOKEN" | tee ~/.slack_token # see below
$ npm install -g slackadaisical
$ slackadaisical

Quick, non-global version:

$ echo "YOUR_SLACK_API_USER_TOKEN" | tee ~/.slack_token # see below
$ git clone https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical.git
$ cd Slackadaisical
$ npm install
$ npm start

Once running, quit the app with Esc or Ctrl-C, and then restart with npm start or yarn start or node dist/index.js.

Configuration

The app will yell at you if you don't install a file with your slack token in it.

Visit https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens and generate a token for yourself.

You can install the token with the command echo "YOUR_TOKEN" | tee ~/.slack_token, or simply paste that token into ~/.slack_token and all will be well.

Usage

Hit Escape or Ctrl-c to exit.

Navigating: Hit Ctrl-l to jump to the channels list (j/k or arrows to move, Enter to select), Ctrl-o to compose (Enter to send), and Ctrl-y to jump to the channel messages history. Hit Esc to exit compose mode.

Mouse: If your terminal supports mouse events, you may try clicking or scrolling in things.

TODO: More stuff here.

Known Issues

Ordering of channels -- because of Slack's API structure, to put the channels in a most-recently-used order we'd need to call conversations.history on every channel. However, Slack's rate limits make that untenable for teams with over 50 channels. For now, channels appear unordered (but bubble to the top upon receiving new messages).

Contributing

Use github, create github issues, use topic branches, make pull requests, be polite, be patient.

Changelog

Check out git log for the Changelog. I will semver and tag once we hit v1.0.0.

License

Everything here is GPL v3.

About the Author

Burak Kanber is co-founder and CTO of Tidal Labs, a tech startup in digital marketing. He loves the command line and wants to spend even more time in it, so he took a day and built a simple CLI app using the Slack API.

Right now the plan for this repository is for me to continue contributing it just to clean up some code and add the occasional feature. If I start using the app every day, I'm sure certain things will bug me and I'll fix them. But this isn't professional-grade software and isn't intended to be. There are no unit tests and the code is poorly organized. If you want to help me fix that, please feel free to contribute! I'm happy to maintain this repository, but I don't want to hear criticism about not making this code professional enough as I was never planning on sharing it publicly and only made an attempt to clean if up after deciding to open source it ;).