Setting Up Slack With i3 on Arch Linux

Key Takeaways

so I wanted to slack on this computer because I have a free code camp group I'm a part of and some other groups I'm in and I wanted to you know have slack and talk to them now I did also try the slack term terminal application but I noticed that the refresh time on the messages was just abysmally slow and there was next to no functionality and slack is resource heavy excuse me and it was just a bit of a noxious but it's it is what it is I prefer to just use slack and it works just fine so what I did is I installed it from the a you are and stole it from the aur and after you install it and go to wherever you're holding the program you go into that git repo and you do make package - si it builds the package and then all you need to do from that point is just say slack and it will open up slack as ah here we go so one thing to know is that by default it's going to be linked to the terminal so if I did that slack you can see the terminal stays open and it owns that process now I talked about the disowning process stuff in another video like if I close the slack window okay great but now this is still bound to slack we got slack as you can see if it is up here so I currently still have it open it's still in the background but this that process is still bound to this terminal so I don't like that because I don't want to have a bunch of terminals just floating open with the process of toning over there and still running so what I did is I made I didn't make a script I actually just bound I changed the hotkeys in my I 3 config I didn't like I mean the I still have it right here the ones that Luke has already set for the gaps I never used it I don't really use use it at all for the most part I typically just even remove the with you know doing that but I removed the hot key bindings for mod s and changed mod s to slack and then if by adding the and disown it disowned slack from the terminal process which means that the terminal can go back to doing whatever it wants and slack just works in the background but what this also means is that if I don't even open the terminal to type the command I can just do mod s what I'm gonna do right now and it will just start slack with no terminal at all because it just it's basically saying open the process are open a terminal call slack disown it and then close the terminal because it doesn't even need it so it just executes the command that's all I have for my slack set up like I don't even need to have a shell script written for this it's just bind it and disown it and there it goes and it just runs in the background now now if I want to end the process I actually have to go over here and quit but yeah that's it and so that's what I have right now and it works for me it's better than the slack term because that that Edgar was barely any functionality in that application and I did not enjoy using it and it's refresh rate was just yeah I mention setting it up what's up pain there's some issues with like the API tokens and just how you access the slack channels you're part of like if I wanted to talk to different select channels I would need an API token for each one and apparently these tokens are legacy and are not really gonna be around for much longer or they're just not supported that very well or people don't want to give them out so luckily the guy who runs my code group gave me a token to test this out and and within minutes I found out oh this is not great so I just ended up downloading slack from the aur and working with that and that's where I'm at and it works for me so let me know if you've done anything similar with slack or what you got going on I am that's all for now till next time