/users/elw/phlog/2017-10-23 on sdf.org

	This is the first post in a series I'l be doing on my experiences
	using Slack [1] at the office. My company recently decided to switch
	to it for inter-office communication. I found several things that I
	disliked about the interface to their official client so I went
	searching for a better way to use their service. After very little
	effort I found a few options that looked promising.

	Slack offers an IRC gateway. This looked promising but since Slack
	offers some different features than standard IRC, the special Slack
	features were not made available. This was going to be a problem for
	me. A little more searching uncovered wee-slack [2], a python plugin
	for the popular weechat [3] command line IRC client. This happens to
	be my IRC client of choice and looked very promising. Instead of
	interfacing with the IRC gateway provided by Slack, it uses the Slack
	API to provide a more feature rich experience while still providing
	the familiar, IRC client interface and commands.

	This first post will be about my experience configuring WeeChat to use
	the wee-slack plugin. Since I use a Macbook Pro for work, this info
	will likely be interesting but only directly useful to users of MacOS.
	Some pieces may carry over if your environment under Linux/BSD is
	similar.

	The installation of wee-slack is fairly straight forward and quick;
	similar to all other WeeChat plugins. You download the python script
	from their git repository and place it in your ~/.weechat/python
	directory. You then load it with /python load wee-slack.py from the
	weechat prompt. Upon doing this I received a python stack trace
	informing me that it was unable to load the 'websockets' module. A
	quick look at their documentation and I see that I need the
	websocket-client python module installed. Running
	`pip install websocket-client` from the command line should have fixed
	this. Unfortunately, the error persisted.

	I have WeeChat installed using Homebrew [4] (a package manager for MacOS).
	Homebrew compiles and installs packages from source. You can run

	`brew edit $APPNAME`

	to modify the homebrew version of a Makefile. This is where you enable
	special options for build-time. In the case of WeeChat, this is used
	to enable language specific plugin support. Python support is one of
	these options. I had already enabled Python support, but it was still
	not working.

	Enter my user environment. I have an exceedingly complicated user
	environment on my work laptop. This is out of necessity due to the
	variance in the type of work I do from day to day. One of the special
	caveats about my work environment is the use of pyenv [5] to manage
	multiple versions of python on the same system in a sane(ish) manner.
	After much searching and discussion on IRC with weechat developers I
	found out that CMAKE does some magic to discover where you have python
	installed. If you're using pyenv, this can confound things a little,
	making it nearly impossible to figure out which version of python it
	has chosen to use and subsequently difficult to find out which python
	I needed install websocket-client in. The workaround is to statically
	define the python binary that should be used by CMAKE. This is done
	with the -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE flag. Setting this to the global python
	version, rebuilding weechat, and installing the websocket-client
	module to the system python fixed the issue with running wee-slack.py
	in weechat.

	As mentioned earlier, wee-slack.py uses a Slack legacy API token to
	interface with Slack. This is then loaded in to weechat using the
	command and restarting your weechat client:

	/set plugins.var.python.slack.slack_api_token [YOUR_SLACK_TOKEN]

	Initial impressions were very positive. There are some great features
	built in to the core plugin and the default behavior is configured
	well out of the box.

	Tomorrow, I will discuss the configuration in more detail and explore
	some additional plugins that I've found useful for providing
	additional functionality and extending the built-in capabilities of
	wee-slack.py.

	I hope you've enjoyed this post, see you tomorrow!

	[1] Slack
	[2] wee-slack.py
	[3] WeeChat
	[4] Homebrew
	[5] Pyenv