How to Setup Emacs-Slack and Get Notifications in Org-Agenda

note:

Thanks to Andrea (ag91) for the initial work he provided.

emacs-slack Oh My!

There is a nice little bit of code that allows you to run slack inside emacs. Seriously, it is pretty nice. However, one thing that is lacking when using slack in emacs is being notified of messages. For me this is a problem, and I am sure there is someone out there thinking, "wait, this is a problem?" Anyway, the following will, hopefully, give all the details you need to get things up and running.

Setting up emacs-slack

Install emacs-slack

As I have stated in previously posts, I am using spacemacs and so installation of emacs-slack consists of adding slack to your dotspacemacs-configuration-layers. For what ever distribution you are using you will need to look into how to install packages.

Slack settings

First thing to do is get your token, which you can do by

Using Chrome, open and sign into the slack customization page, e.g. https://my.slack.com/customize
Right click anywhere on the page and choose "inspect" from the context menu. This will open the Chrome developer tools.
Find the console (it's one of the tabs in the developer tools window)
At the prompt ("> ") type the following: window.prompt("your api token is: ", TS.boot_data.api_token)
Copy the displayed token elsewhere, and close the window.

Once you have your token the next thing that needs to be done is setup a login for slack. I don't like to make UIDs and such public, so I am using pass to save my information, including passwords, as encrypted files on my system and then using password-store-get to access that information. However, you can just enter any information you like as plane text.

;; setup slack
(slack-register-team
  :name <your-slack-team>
  :default t
  :client-id (password-store-get <path-to-uid>)
  :client-secret (password-store-get <path-to-password>)
  :token (password-store-get <path-to-slack-token>)
  :full-and-display-names t
  :subscribed-channels '(<a list of channels you want to be notified about>))

Now that you have your slack login information setup you might want to have some settings to make things easier. One thing emacs-slacks loves to do is ask what team it should use (all the time), so that might be something you want to avoid.

(setq slack-prefer-current-team t)  ;; stop asking me which team to use

A nice timestamp was also something that I really wanted, so let's add that.

;; display a nice timestamp in slack
(setq lui-time-stamp-format "[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M]")
(setq lui-time-stamp-only-when-changed-p t)
(setq lui-time-stamp-position 'right)

Another thing that annoyed me was that in spacemacs the : key was set as a shortcut to insert an emoji, well I am a C++ programmer so that was getting quite annoying.

(evil-define-key 'insert slack-mode-map (kbd ":") nil)  ;; don't insert emoji
(evil-define-key 'insert slack-message-buffer-mode-map (kbd ":") nil)  ;; don't insert emoji
(evil-define-key 'insert slack-thread-message-buffer-mode-map (kbd ":") nil)  ;; don't insert emoji

And for some reason spacemacs didn't provide a shortcut for deleting a slack message, so let's add that too.

(define-key slack-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-d") #'slack-message-delete)

Finally, let's make sure that slack starts

(slack-start)  ;; start slack when opening emacs

For me this is everything I have to setup emacs-slack in a reasonable way.

What About Notifications?

While emacs-slack is pretty sweet, it does lack the ability to notify you when a new message shows up. Of course, you can use slack-all-unread (SPC a c s u in spacemacs), but for some reason this wasn't enough bells and whistles for me. However, we have org-agenda, so why not use that to display direct messages?

First thing to do is create slack.org file. I put this in my org directory, which is located in $HOME/org/. So change the following to fit your setup. In this slack.org file we will create the following list of TODO states

#+TODO: UNREAD(u) | READ(r)

This tells org-mode that the UNREAD state is the only TODO state, while the READ state is the only closed state. It also says not to log state changes.

Now add that org file to your org-agenda-files

(setq org-agenda-files (list "~/org/slack.org" "your other org files you want in the agenda"))

The rest will require us to setup alert (which is included in spacemacs by default). To do this we define a style for alert to use when dealing with slack messages. This style will create TODO items in a slack.org file of your choosing (I put it in $HOME/org/). Alert will get the message from emacs-slack and create a TODO item that I mark as UNREAD. It also limits the message length to 127 characters.

;; setup org-agenda to keep track of unread messages in slack
(alert-define-style
  'my/alert-style :title
  "Make Org headings for messages I receive - Style"
  :notifier
  (lambda (info)
    (when (get-buffer "slack.org") (with-current-buffer "slack.org" (save-buffer)))
    (write-region
      (s-concat
        "* UNREAD "
        (plist-get info :title)
        " : "
        (format "%s %s" (plist-get info :title)
                        (s-truncate 127 (plist-get info :message)))
        "\n"
        (format "<%s>" (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"))
        "\n")
      nil
      "~/org/slack.org"
      t)))
(setq alert-default-style 'message)
(add-to-list 'alert-user-configuration
  '(((:category . "slack")) my/alert-style nil))

With the above setup will be able to see your slack messages show up in org-agenda. Hooray!

Okay, but How do I Mute These Things?

Now that we can display or direct messages in org-agenda we probably want a way to mark them as READ and stop displaying it in our agenda. To do this we are going to add a hook to org-agenda-mode-hook that will provide the keybinding T. This keybinding will mark our message as READ and subsequently archive it. One annoyance with doing this is that every time you want to do anything emacs will ask if you want to save the slack.org and slack.org_archive buffers. To prevent this we can just save those buffers any time we hit T. Be aware this will save those buffers even if the item you are using T on in org-agenda isn't a slack item.

(add-hook 'org-agenda-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key (kbd "T") 'my/org-agenda-todo-archive)))

;; my functions follow
(defun my/save-slack ()
  "Save slack buffers"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (dolist (buf '("slack.org_archive" "slack.org"))
      (set-buffer buf)
      (if (and (buffer-file-name) (buffer-modified-p))
        (basic-save-buffer)
        )
      )
    )
  )

(defun my/org-agenda-todo-archive ()
  "Mark an agenda item as done, archive it, and save the slack buffers"
  (interactive)
  (org-agenda-todo 'done)
  (org-agenda-archive)
  (my/save-slack)
  )

That Stuff I Found Along the Way