plaidchat

A Slack client for Linux. Uses nw.js.

Features:

• Tray icon with notifications
• Multi-team support
• Watch videos in application
• Newsletter to know about updates and new features

Installing

1. Install Node.js. If Node.js is already installed, please continue.

2. Install plaidchat via npm

npm install plaidchat -g

3. Run plaidchat

If you have setup correctly, the above command will install the package somewhere in your path.

Then you can run your client from your terminal of choice.

plaidchat

plaidchat is not created by, affiliated with, or supported by Slack Technologies, Inc.

Newsletter

Want to hear about our updates and new features as soon as they happen?

Sign up for our newsletter!

CLI options

We provide various CLI options via plaidchat --help

$ plaidchat --help

  Usage: plaidchat [options]

  Options:

    -h, --help          output usage information
    -V, --version       output the version number
    --minimize-to-tray  When the tray icon is clicked, hide the window rather than minimize
    --close-to-tray     When the close button is clicked, minimize the app to tray instead of killing it.

Running and Developing

Clone the repo

git clone [email protected]:plaidchat/plaidchat.git && cd plaidchat

Install dependencies

npm install

Run it

npm start

Application structure

Our application is built on top of React and Flux. The folders for our application are:

• app/ - Container for our application
  • css/ - CSS for our application
  • components/ - Container for different React components
  • dispatchers/ - Container for Flux dispatchers
  • js/ - JS that handle nw.js setup and initial loading of React
  • stores/ - Container for Flux stores
  • views/ - HTML pages loaded by nw.js

With the Flux infrastructure, all our data flows one-way; from components to dispatchers to stores to components (and repeat).

• Components manage the DOM and rendering other components
  • From the MVC perspective, it's a hybrid of controllers/views
• Dispatchers manage passing through events from components to stores
  • These are more/less global single-channel mediators
• Stores manage internal application data and emit events on change
  • These are a hybrid of models/controllers as they both save state as well as manage its updates

More information can be read in the Flux documentation:

http://facebook.github.io/flux/

Testing

Tests can be run via the following commands:

# Start up a Selenium server for integration tests
npm run start-webdriver

# In another tab, run all our tests (unit, integration, linting)
npm test

The integration tests require a bit of explanation. Please see their documentation for more info.

Issues

libudev.so

JBKahn Pointed out that libudev.so differs on different machines. If you run into

./resources/node-webkit/Linux64/nw: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Give Issue #1 a look.

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Great, we are always looking for more great people.

Get started by finding an issue with the "help wanted" label and submitting a pull request.

https://github.com/plaidchat/plaidchat/issues?q=label%3A%22help+wanted%22

License

plaidchat is licensed under the MIT license.

Upon installation, we may copy libffmpegsumo.so from electron-prebuilt (from ffmpeg) into our repository. We are required to mention that this file is licensed under the GPL license.