Ripcord has had search support in Slack for a while, it's under the Workspace menu. Otherwise, yeah. It's unfortunate to have to open the browser to do some of this stuff but the day-to-day experience of using it is great.

Thanks -- I really had no idea.

I feel like it being based on Electron is the least bad thing about it. Native or not, you have to reach the API for everything and that's slow.

Agree to disagree. Selecting a channel in Slack takes like 300ms for me almost every time. There seems to be an inherent UI lag with Slack and Discord. Ripcord, on the other hand, is instantaneous.

Wholeheartedly agree that that's not acceptable performance, but blaming electron, which runs on chromium which is famously fast (despite its other issues) seems misguided.

To me it sounds like an artifact of architectural choices, eg by polling before rendering to avoid flicker, lack of client side caching, or possibly just bloat. Companies won't stop their poor software practices even if they switched to native.

The post I responded to mentioned the Electron; I was talking about the client performance in the browser, but I've had similar experiences with the Electron clients for Discord and Slack.

I don't doubt you can make a performant snappy chat GUI with Electron/web tech, but more often than not, in my experience, Qt apps (like Ripcord) perform much better and are less RAM hungry.

It could be an artifact of architectural choices, but Microsoft Teams also has that flickering/loading when switching tabs or chats.

Is there a better frontend for Ripcord? I tried it, and while it's fast, it's just so utilitarian.

Nope. The look is part of the appeal; it puts function over form, and looks native-ish instead of like a webapp.

There is a theming system included, however, it only allows you to change colors/fonts of UI elements.