Ah, the good old "just when I began to think Slack is pretty decent after all", still remembering fights with Windows office communicator and others. The reaso

Ah, the good old "just when I began to think Slack is pretty decent after all", still remembering fights with Windows office communicator and others. The reason I use the IRC gateway is primarily to cut down all the extra crap except textual messages, and to be able to message from the console without having to switch windows or launch web pages (I run irssi 24/7 under tmux). This has been a nice sweet spot, with the improvement of seeing message history as well. The trend for things built in the 10's seem to be constant change and fear for shutting down. Conversely, IRC from the early 90's still works fine. IRC is like water pipes. It doesn't come with flashing lights but it does what it needs to do, does it reliably, and nothing more. And you can buy bottled water in various flavours but if water pipes didn't exist life would be far worse.