💬 Slack Chat

Slack's UI is a notification firehose built for humans clicking around — not for agents or power users who want to read a thread, search history, or fire off a reply without leaving the terminal.

slack-chat talks directly to the Slack web API over HTTP using saved session credentials — no browser in the hot path, no server to babysit. It's fast, scriptable, and battle-tested with modern AI. The browser is launched exactly once, for SSO login, then closed.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Runtime	Bun v1.3+
Language	JavaScript (ES modules, .mjs)
Transport	native fetch + WebSocket (Slack web API)
Data	YAML files (js-yaml)
Login	the reusable browser tool (headed SSO, one-time)

Setup

bun install
bun link                 # exposes the `slack-chat` command globally
slack-chat auth login    # one-time SSO login (requires the `browser` tool)
slack-chat auth status   # confirm credentials are valid

Usage

slack-chat read-message "C05R34P9KAA:1709253181.804579" -B 2 -A 2
slack-chat search "site reliability" -n 5
slack-chat activity --tab mentions -n 10
slack-chat post-message "#sre-team" "Heads up: deploy starting"
slack-chat resolve @jdoe
slack-chat listen

See SKILL.md for the full command reference, parameters, and output formats.

Caching

User and channel metadata are cached under db/cache/{users,channels}.yml. Lookups are cache-first; on a miss the API result is written back. This keeps the tool fast and avoids re-fetching IDs Slack won't expand for you. Use --refresh on resolve to bypass the cache after a rename.