Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar. I want to run it in a terminal window alongside IRC etc. I have no desire to put up with their ridiculous UI/UX decisions

Ran this for years, game-changer... https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

You can't really do chat via rest, you need some kind of socket/sse for chat, otherwise all clients need to poll every second

It’s a good thing that Slack uses WebSockets! I think they even had the API for custom clients available, it’s only for Slack Apps now: https://docs.slack.dev/apis/events-api/using-socket-mode/

(And of course, way back then there was an official IRC interface, too)

Duh...

My comment was a response to

> Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar.