Show HN: Lechat – team chat for developers(lechat.im)

34 pointsby Qwlvor 13 Jahren45 comments

Show HN: Lechat – team chat for developers

http://lechat.im

17 comments

zhenya_kvor 13 Jahren

We're a team of five (two work remotely) at Citybot -- Lechat works very well for us. History is always there, no ridiculous kissing smiley faces (hello Skype), no ridiculous out of sync notifications that are months old (hello Skype). We've been beta testing it for about a month and it's been making our lives easier and communication clearer. The support is right on. The speed with which the Lechat team adds useful features is phenomenal. Never at expense of quality. Would love to see the native clients, and they say they're coming soon. I absolutely totally recommend it. Try it out!

mapleoinvor 13 Jahren

Still no features that I don't have in IRC+emacs. Except for the code highlighter/formatting which is ok, but not enough.

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

Fair point, but you try and get a whole company to use IRC+emacs ;) Not gonna happen.

lmmvor 13 Jahren

The first company I worked for did everything on IRC. They were also by far the most successful company I've worked for. Coincidence?

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

Sure, and I still use IRC every day. But IRC+emacs is going to be a tiny fraction of the world, saying "this product is useless because there is an advanced alternative" is like saying "Oh, why would anyone ever want to fly commercial, it's so much easier and more fun to build and fly your own airplane".

mapleoinvor 13 Jahren

emacs was just my example, but there are tens of IRC clients, from web clients to GUIs to android apps. Everyone can find a client they can easily used.

mehulkarvor 13 Jahren

We have a pretty small team and use IRC pretty heavily. Works great and integrates with our internal github as well.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

What about search + multiple chat windows on same screen?

mapleoinvor 13 Jahren

I can search an emacs IRC buffer (it's just like searching a text file) or if I want to search everything I can just grep in my logs directory and get search results in emacs which I can then grep some more or easily copy paste to another buffer where I have a file open or a colleague who I'm chatting with.

For multiple windows, I can split my emacs in however many windows I want horizontally and vertically and switch around with whatever key bindings I want.

grishickvor 13 Jahren

we even have our marketing guy use lechat. Try making your marketing use emacs ;)

shuranevor 13 Jahren

The finance team at appnexus use ipython internally to scrape files, create aggregates, etc.

I dunno, it's just about teaching them about it at the right level. Don't swamp them with thousands of details, and don't leave them without a lifeline to call upon.

Although this is assuming they are a bit open-minded.

shuranevor 13 Jahren

lomowinvor 13 Jahren

only problem with that is to find someone else who knows what emacs and irc are and how to use it, but anyone can use web-app or mobile-app.

grishickvor 13 Jahren

word

avreevor 13 Jahren

Does this work with XMPP? Also, any chance of Pivotal Tracker integration? I've tried HipChat, Jaconda, Hall, Skype, etc... still trying to find something that works well for our team at Getaround.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Does not work with XMPP. We're opting for high-quality native clients for everything (coming soon).

avreevor 13 Jahren

But you're chat for developers! You're never going to be able to offer the level of customization people get out of Adium/Messages/their chat client of choice.

Facebook took this approach with Facebook Chat but eventually offered XMPP. Curious to hear what value you think the native client approach would offer.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

We just want a nicer HipChat, that's all.

avreevor 13 Jahren

OK. I wish you luck. HipChat uses XMPP, by the way. http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-ja...

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Hi there. We'll integrate with Pivotal Tracker - we're sort of implementing integrations on demand.

citricsquidvor 13 Jahren

The fake names are disconcerting for a product that will handle sensitive information (chats).

(edit: unless 2 co-founders are genuinely named Bob Smith and John Doe, in which case maybe consider changing your names :p)

trumbitta2vor 13 Jahren

Theese guys are really serious about ninjitzu. See Robert Smith here: http://www.whois.com/whois/lechat.im

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Sorry. We'll put up our real names soon. We're legit though, I swear!

lechatvor 13 Jahren

I kind of wish those were our real names, would be awesome.

grishickvor 13 Jahren

We have a distributed team of 4 engineers in 3 different locations. We have been using lechat.im for the last month and it has improved the information flow dramatically. Before lechat.im we tried hangouts, Skype and gTalk and those all fall short of the features that matter for a distributed team. Things that I love about lechat: search, SVN and git hooks (checking go into a separate room as messages), notifications, chat history.

spovznervor 13 Jahren

We've been using lechat for the last few weeks and we are very happy with it. The UI is simple and clean. Fast history search is the killer feature for us. A number of nice UI details really show that this chat was developed by developers for developers.

[deleted]vor 13 Jahren

lebski88vor 13 Jahren

Are your chat logs encrypted and suitably protected? Losing your chat logs could be very damaging for a company - knowing that logs are safe is a required feature for us.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Yes. Encrypted filesystem, continuous encrypted backups.

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

That should be in the list of features on home page.

luiperdvor 13 Jahren

Nice. I was at first very confused about the support room chat, thought it was just a page to help you get started. Turns out it's a support chat for the app.

Very nice though.

demandingdatavor 13 Jahren

any plans to let us own our data - as in a hosted offering? The idea of my teams chats being owned only by me appeals

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Yeah, we're working on an appliance version of the product.

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

Looks clean and simple. What's your backend infrastructure? Didn't see much technical detail in the FAQ :)

lechatvor 13 Jahren

Thanks! Erlang + websockets + Postgres

ajacksifiedvor 13 Jahren

Neat. My friends and I switched from ejabberd to Prosody[1], a Lua XMPP server; Lua is quite a bit easier to use than Erlang (unless you are already an Erlang grandwizard), so writing new plugins is a breeze with prosody. Of course, ejabberd already has a lot of plugins written, so lots of benefits there as well.

Good luck! Hosted xmpp could be executed really well.

[1] http://prosody.im/

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

What are you using for full-text search, anything unusual or just postgres built-in search?

lomowinvor 13 Jahren

I can also see nginx from http headers.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

True. nginx as well.

darwinwidjajavor 13 Jahren

Looks cool, let me try it with our distributed team (shanghai and bangalore) - 7 people team.

shatlovskyvor 13 Jahren

Great job, guys! Lechat is surprisingly powerful despite its lightweight and simple ui.

aren55555vor 13 Jahren

Like the pricing page. Simple.

thesharpvor 13 Jahren

Guys, make a twitter account so we can easily catch on with the updates.

lechatvor 13 Jahren

http://twitter.com/lechat_im

We'll link to it from the site soon.

scottmagdaleinvor 13 Jahren

Love the pricing page.

aeontechvor 13 Jahren

btw, I recommend you change the code font-face order of

    Monaco,Menlo,Consolas,"Courier New",monospace;

    Menlo,Consolas,Monaco,"Courier New",monospace;

this way the nicer system-specific fonts will actually work, right now everything gets rendered in Monaco since it's universally available, and the nicer fonts are never used.

Also, maybe pick a more contrasting scheme for the syntax highlighting in code, right now it's very nearly indistinguishable from plaintext...