slack-status

A ruby script to set your slack status, including an optional "away" message.

What?

Slack is great, but it's missing a crucial feature for collaboration: you can't set an away message.

This is a short message to let your teammates know your status. For example, "lunch", or "bb 3:30". For a remote team, this subtle communication is crucial, and improves the efficiency of the team.

There is a kludgy, RSI inducing way to achieve this in slack: edit your profile and set your first name to something like "Ryan (lunch)". This works, but it's a lot of mousing around.

This script does it for you, by using an undocumented api to set the first name in your slack profile.

Note: This hack is useful only if your co-worker's slack preferences are set to "display real names". See the Slack Preferences / Messages & Media / Display Options:

Installation

First, get your slack api token here

Example setup for Mac OSX:

1. Save slack.rb in your home directory
2. Open a terminal
3. chmod +x slack.rb
4. Edit .bashrc and add the following:

export SLACK_URL=https://yourteam.slack.com
export SLACK_TOKEN=your-slack-token
alias away='~/slack.rb away'
alias lunch='~/slack.rb away lunch'
alias back='~/slack.rb back'

Finally, source .bashrc

Example Usage

{away | back } [message]
away lunch
back
back in meeting