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https://github.com/yue/wey

Fast open source Slack desktop app
https://github.com/yue/wey

Last synced: 16 days ago
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Fast open source Slack desktop app

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README 

        
# Wey



Fast open source Slack desktop app, written in Node.js with native UI powered

by [the Yue library](https://github.com/yue/yue).



Note that this project is not actively maintained, you may want to use the

fork [lounge-lizard](https://github.com/cacticouncil/lounge-lizard/) instead.



__Do not use this for work, you might miss important messages due to bugs and

missing features.__



## Screenshots



|  macOS            |    Linux          |  Windows          |

| ----------------- | ----------------- | ----------------- |

| ![][mac-screen]   | ![][linux-screen] | ![][win-screen]   |



## Releases



To find latest releases for different platforms, go to the [Releases][releases]

page on GitHub.



## Technical stack



* [Yue](https://github.com/yue/yue) - Cross-platform native UI library

* [Yode](https://github.com/yue/yode) - Node.js fork with GUI message loop

* [Yackage](https://github.com/yue/yackage) - Package Node.js project with Yode

* [Node.js](https://nodejs.org)



## Resources usage



Resources used by Wey are based on following things:



* The Node.js runtime.

* Native windows and widgets.

* HTML view used for rendering messages.

* JavaScript code for communicating with Slack.

* Cached Users and messages information in teams.



Normally for multiple teams with heavy traffics, Wey should not have any

significant CPU usage, and RAM usage is usually under 100MB. However if you

have a team with more than 10k users in it, the memory usage may increase a lot.



## Design principles



Wey is developed with following principles, the ultimate goal is to provide a

fast and powerful chat app.



### Use native UI for almost everything



Most parts of Wey should be created with native UI widgets from Yue library,

when there is need for custom UI, draw it manually.



### HTML is our friend



Webview is a great tool as long as we use it wisely. For rendering the rich

messages of Slack, HTML is the best tool.



The HTML pages showed in Wey should be static for best performance, the usage

of JavaScript in the pages must be minimal. We should not use any external CSS

or JavaScript library/framework, every style and animation must be hand written.



### Minimal dependencies



Be careful when adding dependencies, only use third party modules that are small

and without tons of dependencies.



### Hide details of chat service providers



While Wey currently only supports Slack, it is on roadmap to add support for

more services, and in future we will support plugins to add arbitrary services.



To achieve this we must ensure the views and controllers must only operate on

the public interfaces of models, all internal implementations must be hidden

from outside.



### Separated views



Wey supports multiple windows with different types for reading messages, so the

views should act only as users of models, and should not manage the models.



As benefit creating views in Wey is very fast, opening a new window is almost

as fast as showing a hidden window. Users can close all windows and run Wey in

background, while still be able to open a new window quickly.



### Correctly unload things



While JavaScript has garbage collections, it is still very easy to cause memory

leaks when careless referencing objects together. Views in Wey are reloaded

frequently (for example switching accounts and closing windows), so it is

important to ensure everything event subscription is detached when unloading

a view.



## Contributions



Please limit the size of pull requests under 300 lines, otherwise it would be

rather hard to review the code. If you have a big feature to add, please

consider splitting it into multiple pull requests.



It is also encouraged to fork this project or even develop commercial apps based

on this project, as long as you follow the GPLv3 license.



## Performance bottleneck



In Wey most time are spent on networking, especially on startup when fetching

channels information from Slack, and performance is usually limited by

Slack's APIs.



### Most operations are done via web API



In Slack while there is Real Time Messaging API, most common operations can only

be done via web APIs, i.e. by sending HTTPS requests, and it is really slow.



### Messages do not include user information



The messages history we pulled from Slack does not include full user

information, it only has user IDs in it. So in order to render the messages we

have to pull users list first.



However certain Slack teams have more than 20k users, and it is impossible to

download all users' information and cache them. Because of this rendering

messages becomes asynchronous work, whenever an uncached user ID is encountered,

we have to wait and pull user's information before rendering the message.



And for large teams we usually end up with caching more than 10k users, which

uses a huge JavaScript object, and takes lots of memory.



### Some bots are not returned in `users.list`



While the `users.list` should also return bot users, it somehow does not return

certain bot users. As a result even for small teams that we can cache all the

users, we still have to spend time fetching user information when rendering

channel messages involving bots.



## Quirks



I have met some quirks when using Slack APIs, any help would be appreciated.



* To mark a channel as read we need to send last read timestamp, but it is

  really to determine which timestamp to send. Marking certain bot messages as

  read would make Slack server think the channel is unread.



## License



The main source code under `lib/` are published under GPLv3, other things are

published under public domain.



[releases]: https://github.com/yue/wey/releases

[token]: https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens

[mac-screen]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/639601/38463114-178afd9e-3b2e-11e8-9650-09b5d981523b.png

[linux-screen]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/639601/38463115-17b8c7e2-3b2e-11e8-8f75-5a76f87686f3.png

[win-screen]: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/639601/38463105-97644cc4-3b2d-11e8-97a1-6cdb451ae3a8.png