What does HackerNews think of zulip?
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip
I've been using it at https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ for over 5 years now, it's great
And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message.
Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites.
So basically Slack is quite crap.
One of my personal goals for Zulip (https://github.com/zulip/zulip/#readme) is for it to be a teaching-quality codebase. This entails a lot of decisions about how Zulip is designed and how we as a community collaborate on it. But above all, it entails a focus on constantly trying to debug and fix barriers to new contributors joining the project, in addition to investing in things like readability, well-designed test suites, documentation for contributors, etc.
I'd look for those attributes in a project.
https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/architecture...
Zulip is Open Source, so do take a look at our GitHub page if you folks want to dive deeper or want to get some hands on experience. We are a welcoming community to new contributors :)
https://github.com/zulip/zulip
Disclaimar: I work at Zulip.
- Zulip has something called a "topic" which is basically a Slack thread but with a name/subject-line. Unlike Slack threads though, every message you send has to be sent in a topic. Zulip makes it much easy to context switch between these topics too. Ever have a situation in Slack where two people are discussing something in a channel instead of using a thread or DM? That isn't possible in Zulip.
- The Zulip UI offers a lots of nice features compared to Slack too. For one, you can see the number of unread messages in each topic directly from the main page. Zulip also supports multi-line messages so you don't have to send a bunch of message one right after the other to break up text, you can add line breaks directly to your message.
- Zulip has a "message drafts" features which is nice when you want to draft a message (or multiple messages), but will send it later. Zulip will hang onto your drafts until you need it.
- Zulip has full markdown support. You can format links, images, and tables (which are all especially nice when using bots) using standard markdown syntax.
- Zulip has full color syntax highlighting when embedding code-snippets into messages! It has support for basically every programming language I can think of (including brain-fuck!).
- Zulip has support for latex equations in messages.
- Zulip is open-source! You can use the version of Zulip hosted at zulipchat.com or you can deploy your own Zulip server by grabbing the source code from github (https://github.com/zulip/zulip).
- In the time since I have switched from Slack to Zulip (about 1 years ago now), Slack has gone down 3-4 times and has had other connectivity issues; Zulip had maybe 1-2 minor interruptions that I can think of in that time.