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by ssmoot 3974 days ago
Since I used the keyboard for most of my navigation in HipChat I find Slack incredibly annoying. With HipChat I could rearrange channels and have my most often used 3 at the top and switch between with a couple keystrokes. With Slack it's so much more cumbersome.

Slack feels much slower.

In Hipchat you can edit your last message with Vim style substitution strings. i.e.: s/were/where/

The Channel/Group distinction in Slack is useless and annoying since you have to adjust team broadcasts to the channel you're in (@group or @channel).

Slack doesn't have @here (so offline people don't get pinged). i.e.: "@here Anyone up for lunch?"

I'd be much less annoyed with Slack if it let me rearrange Channels. But still. It seems like it trades obvious functionality for stupid meme integrations. Gets under my skin.

Personally, being in a ~20 person company, I really don't really care about per-channel notifications. YAGNI. If I don't want to be notified, I just don't join that channel. Otherwise if someone pings me with @group, I want to see it. And if it's important enough, don't depend on the chat app sending my phone a notification. Text or Call me. We're a Mac shop so that's just a keystroke away with the Messages app or FaceTime Audio if you're at your desk anyways. Don't tell me sites are down and the building is on fire through Slack.

/end-rant. :-)
1 comments
Fishkins 3974 days ago
I know about the s// substitution, but it just isn't very useful. Sometimes I'll have sent a couple messages before I notice a typo. Also, it's very limited in the type of edits it can make. Last time I tried to use it I realized I had typed "it's" instead of "its", but it turns out I had already using "it's" earlier in the message. I ended up making both "it's" wrong instead of correcting the one I wanted to.

Slack added @here a few weeks ago. Otherwise that would have been on my list of Hipchat pluses.

Being able to rearrange channels would be nice, but it isn't a big deal to me. I mostly use the "Jump to next unread message" hotkey in Slack to switch between channels.

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