Ripcord is great and I use it for Discord and Slack, but it is far from feature complete. Important to note that Ripcord is developed by one person. Some major things that are lacking:
* No search (Slack/Discord)
* No huddles in Slack
* Thread support in Discord
For these reasons, I typically navigate to Discord/Slack in the browser when I need access to those features. Not ideal, but the snappiness of Ripcord over the slow bloat of Slack/Discord make it worth it to me.
Ripcord has had search support in Slack for a while, it's under the Workspace menu. Otherwise, yeah. It's unfortunate to have to open the browser to do some of this stuff but the day-to-day experience of using it is great.
Agree to disagree. Selecting a channel in Slack takes like 300ms for me almost every time. There seems to be an inherent UI lag with Slack and Discord. Ripcord, on the other hand, is instantaneous.
Wholeheartedly agree that that's not acceptable performance, but blaming electron, which runs on chromium which is famously fast (despite its other issues) seems misguided.
To me it sounds like an artifact of architectural choices, eg by polling before rendering to avoid flicker, lack of client side caching, or possibly just bloat. Companies won't stop their poor software practices even if they switched to native.
The post I responded to mentioned the Electron; I was talking about the client performance in the browser, but I've had similar experiences with the Electron clients for Discord and Slack.
I don't doubt you can make a performant snappy chat GUI with Electron/web tech, but more often than not, in my experience, Qt apps (like Ripcord) perform much better and are less RAM hungry.
I use Ripcord to access Slack daily and it’s… very mediocre. It uses Qt, so it looks terrible (but at least it’s not a web browser). It’s more native than an electron app, but not by a lot. It doesn’t even use native scroll bars which can be really irritating at times. All images are thumbnail size and if you click to enlarge, it dumps you to the web, which slack.com just ignores. It logs you in and then doesn’t take you to the image or file you clicked on.
I don’t hate it (as much as I hate using Slack in a web browser or electron app), but I certainly don’t love it. I’ll be giving Shrugs a try, but it sounds like it’s missing a lot, too, so I’m not hopeful.
Video calls are somewhat involved, and no third-party implementation exists to my knowledge. Discord uses WebRTC over the browser, but the desktop app uses a native module written in C++ that I assume handles decoding, audio screensharing, and other related functionalities. It's not impossible of course, but the cognitive barrier is much higher than simply observing the WebSocket and HTTP requests to get text chat working.
Not necessarily, although this gets routinely brought up in the Ripcord Discord server. Ripcord essentially just uses the browser APIs, so it's not really different from opening Discord in Firefox.
That being said, Discord can ban people at random for whatever reason they choose, and this has happened before.
For the record, I've been using Ripcord with the same Discord account for 3 years, daily.
It's probably against their terms of service, so maybe. It probably depends on a combination of (over)zealous automation and whether they feel it's in their expedient interest to crack down on.
Their client exists almost entirely to collect data about you (chiefly what games you're playing and with whom.) That's one reason they are so quick to ban non-official-client users.
[1]: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/