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Sadly none of those are alternatives if you don’t have a say in what your workplace uses.



If that's the case:

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client)

https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)


I tried to use ripcord for about a month. There were several features that I really liked (for example - tabs are amazing imo).

The deal breaker ultimately was that I didn't receive all of my notifications which was a problem for work. But I would love to try it again if they solve that problem.

Edit: The hotkeys and the lightweight feel to it was also amazing BTW.


Do you have a way to reproduce it, even unreliably? Or any other info? If so, could you email me cancel@cancel.fm ? The Slack server determines most notifications that the client is supposed to display -- the logic all runs on the server, and is sent as explicit events to the client. So, the only way that Ripcord would be losing notifications for standard chat messages is if the server did not send the notification events, or the connection went down for several minutes and had to be restarted without an event replay.

But if you have any lead on a way to show that notifications aren't being displayed, that would be really useful information.

I've heard of some people using Ripcord on Windows 10 having some kind of automatic suppression of notifications occur at the the OS level. Probably some automated anti-user-spam thing. In which case, the notifications would only be listed internally within Ripcord, but not in the OS notifications list. Is that the case, or were they also not visible within Ripcord's own notifications list? (This one isn't relevant if you're using Mac or Linux.)


Is there a way you could enable touch events for scrolling the chat history? I'm using a Surface and trying to touch scroll just selects messages. Other than that my first impressions are pretty good.


I'm actually not sure why this isn't working for a Surface running Windows. I would have assumed that it would emulate mousewheel events.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/wind...

I'm guessing this is what needs to be handled. I wonder if Qt is already interacting with this system, and I'm handling it improperly on Win32. Does scrolling with touch gestures work for you in other types of scrollable views, such as the sidebar, or the workspace files list?


It seems to be an issue with Qt, I just checked a bunch of the example applications and none of them allow touch-based scrolling.

There's also this, an open 5 year old bug report. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461


OK. I will see if I can find a way to emulate a touch device like this one on Windows for testing. I can pre-empt Qt's input system for these types of events and handle them manually in Ripcord's own application code.


Seconding, please do. I'm a paying Ripcord user working on a Dell 2-in-1 (essentially a Surface clone with a better price tag), and I miss proper touch (and pen) handling too - to the point that I started looking into fixing this on my own with AutoHotkey (I'm thinking of an always-on-top semi-transparent area I could touch / pen over, which would translate this into appropriate mouse events to send to Ripcord to make it scroll). But it would be vastly better if I didn't need to do this :).

Oh, and since I have you here: would it be possible for you to look into the group DM handling? We run plenty of group DMs at work, and I have two problems with them: one, they tend to randomly disappear from the sidebar, and two, there seems to be no way to start a group DM from Ripcord.

Also, again, thank you for your hard work.


The next update will partially address the group DM thing.


Thank you!


Friendly reminder that Ripcord is closed source shareware (free by now, $20 when it goes out of alpha). If you help this guy, he'll be pocketing the profits.


Are you seriously suggesting not to investigate an issue because the person at the other end is making money selling software they wrote? Heresy! Heaven forbid they might even fix the bug with a little information and improve the software for everyone - paying users and shareware users alike. It’s not always a zero sum game.

I didn’t know about ripcord until it was mentioned here and I’m about to pull out my credit card to buy a license just so that I might have an option for a slack client that’s not slack.


You make it sound like that's a problem. I think it's pretty great that he's pocketing the profits, to be honest. I hope he can continue to develop the app.


It's worth the money. I've paid, and I'd happily consider paying $20 a month (especially if I could deduct it as business expense).

Closed source is a bit of a downer, but FWIW, I did some preliminary inspection with GlassWire; Ripcord seems to stay true to its word: no telemetry.


For me the dealbreaker was the visuals; I've been spoiled by years of good looking webapps or native (ios, macos) ones. You can't get away with making a chat client look like 90's IRC clients anymore, imo.


Many people prefer that. Slack is a total eyesore, IMO.


Personally, I like it this way. I like my apps how Tufte like his charts: information-dense, free of chartjunk.


Great tip, thanks!




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