Slack for the CLI – Sclack

At work, I’m always working at the Terminal. I have my email (mutt), a few bash terminals for looking after servers and cutting some code, my Facebook messenger (see messer) and my workplace instant messenger of choice, Slack. I combine all of this in tmux, so I can switch workstreams in a keypress or two. No moving those hands off the keyboard. The rodent stays idle.

If you’ve not already heard of Slack, it is quickly becoming one of he most popular instant messaging platforms for workplaces. It integrates with many tools that are commonplace in technology companies, and it is easy to use. 

I have tried a number of Terminal based Slack clients, and for various reasons, they’ve always been ditched in favour of the official Linux Slack client, or the website version. They just didn’t work great. Sclack is different, it uses keybindings I’m  used to (in my case ViM keybindings), it’s colourful and it even supports giphy! (well, kind of!). 

To install Sclack, you’re going to need to have Python 3 & pip3 installed on your machine if you don’t already have it:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Once you have pip3, simply run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/haskellcamargo/sclack.git
cd sclack
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
chmod +x ./app.py
./app.py

Run ./app.py after giving the correct permissions (chmod 755 app.py for example). If you don’t have a ~/.sclack file, you can generate one by providing your workspace token. You can change the theme, enable or disable images, emojis, markdown, configure keyboards and everything else in the config.jsonfile.

You can check out the author’s github website here: https://github.com/haskellcamargo/sclack