Slinger — A Slack Thinger

What?

User scripts and stylesheets in Slack for OS X.

Why?

Because I got really annoyed that ⌘ + W closed the entire Slack window instead of the current channel, group, or direct message. Also for fun.

How?

$ curl -s https://zachsnow.github.io/slinger/slinger.sh | bash

This patches Slack.app to load slinger.js, a simple user script that adds that missing shortcut (and allows access to the Developer Tools, too).

If you'd prefer, you can patch Slack to load whatever user script you'd like. Instead of executing slinger.sh, download it then simply pass the URL of the script as an argument:

$ bash slinger.sh https://someotherdomain.com/some-other-script.js

Caveats: the script must be served over HTTPS, with a CA-signed certificate (otherwise the underlying WebView will not deign to load it).

No, But How?

Slack.app is an WebView that loads the Slack web application, so we just patch it to run some Javascript in the context of the view.

That script then loads additional styles, adds elements to the page, binds keyboard shortcuts, and so on. It also ensures that the Developer Tools menu is always available.

Of course, you don't need to patch the app if you don't want to; instead you can just open the Developer Tools (by running Slack with the --dev command-line option) and enter the above code in the Console, everytime you start Slack. But that's no fun!