slacknimate

Realtime text animation for Slack messages :dancers:

Primary use case: ChatOps

Alternative uses

While slacknimate is primarily intended for ChatOps, it has become popular for... other use cases.

...Such as comedy:

...Or maybe art:

Installation

Simply download a binary for your OS/architecture from the Releases Page and put it somewhere on your $PATH.

Homebrew users, you can also just brew install slacknimate.

Authentication

Generate your Slack app and generate an API token. Note that the app will need appropriate OAuth scopes to post messages to your desired destination.

You'll need to either pass it to the program via the --api-token flag or store it as SLACK_TOKEN environment variable.

Usage

NAME:
   slacknimate - text animation for Slack messages

USAGE:
   slacknimate [options]

VERSION:
   1.1.0-development

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --token value, -a value    Slack API token* [$SLACK_TOKEN]
   --channel value, -c value  Slack channel* [$SLACK_CHANNEL]
   --username value           Slack username [$SLACK_USERNAME]
   --icon-url value           Slack icon from url [$SLACK_ICON_URL]
   --icon-emoji value         Slack icon from emoji [$SLACK_ICON_EMOJI]
   --delay value, -d value    minimum delay between frames (default: 1)
   --loop, -l                 loop content upon reaching EOF (default: false)
   --preview                  preview on terminal only (default: false)
   --help, -h                 show help (default: false)
   --version, -v              print the version (default: false)

You can also use Slacknimate directly via the Go package.

Simple animation loops

$ slacknimate -c "#general" --loop < examples/emoji.txt

Realtime process monitoring

Why spam a chatroom with periodic monitoring messages when you can have realtime status updates so that a message is never out of date?

See for example this example:

$ ./examples/process.sh 5 | slacknimate -c "#devops"
2016/02/23 19:03:14 initial frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 0/5
2016/02/23 19:03:15 updated frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 1/5
2016/02/23 19:03:16 updated frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 2/5
2016/02/23 19:03:17 updated frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 3/5
2016/02/23 19:03:18 updated frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 4/5
2016/02/23 19:03:19 updated frame G07AJU0SH/1456272194.000086: Processing items: 5/5

Done!

Preview in terminal

If you aren't certain about your source, you can preview what the animation would look like in the terminal via the --preview flag.

$ slacknimate --preview --loop -d 0.25 < examples/sample.txt