Issues with Slack? Use IRC instead

Slack, even though quite useful, usually keep having problems of its own. Sometimes you can’t even open the app. Also it consumes a lot of CPU resources draining down the battery to say the least, but not anymore. They already are providing way to use custom gateways, jabber(XMPP) and IRC.

All you need to do is, visit

Account Settings Page

And click on the Gateway Configuration button to see which gateways are allowed on your team’s slack.

In case you’ve got the option of IRC and you’re using Mac, you can easily shift to Limechat which is very lightweight IRC client and consumes negligible CPU resources. Thanks to Jan Dembowski for giving this idea in the meetup.

Though there’s one issue I faced with Limechat as well, it does not allow you to stop the notifications for people going away and coming back online, which happens quite a lot in the WordPress’ slack community, so I found a patch for that as well, in LimeChat application, go to

Preferences -> Theme

Now select any theme you like, and then click “Open in Finder”. Open the .css file of the theme and add these lines in the top.

body.normal .event[type=mode] { display:none;}
body.normal .event[type=join] { display:none;}
body.normal .event[type=quit] { display:none;}
body.normal .event[type=part] { display:none;}
body.normal .event[type=nick] { display:none;}Code language: CSS (css)

Now all the remains is the useful information that you want to deal with.

IRC comes with the benefits of lower CPU consumption(equals more battery life) but you don’t get the complete chat history while you were gone, so might want to check via Slack, what happened in the channel while you were away.

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