I like my Emacs modeline to be clean. Emacs Slack uses Circe's tracking.el and I show here how to mute it so that new Slack conversations leave you focused.

The hack for now is (defun tracking-status () "") in your configuration, while hopefully this PR will get merged soon.

My Emacs modeline is precious. I like to keep it minimal: file characteristics, lines, major mode and Org clocking.

A lot of modes propose their alerts to appear in the modeline. For some time, for example, I used happily mu4e-alert, and I ended up realizing that little blinking in the modeline disrupted my concentration. Some users would likely find counterproductive to have feeds, emails and Slack running in Emacs if you care for your concentration (for example, I am referring here to Manuel Uberti's recent post).

I like these tools in Emacs because I can customize them to my workflow: having Slack conversations end up in my Org Agenda and being able to access them with one click facilitates my work while delaying distractions.

Emacs Slack notifications gave me some troubles though: any new message in my agenda would also have an entry in my modeline. Distraction!

The funny thing is that you end up doing bad stuff, although you know it is deleterious. As soon as I receive a Slack message in a channel I have joined, I end up instinctively clicking on the modeline entry Emacs Slack created for me. Naturally, most of the time is a waste of time, and I interrupted my work for nothing.

Other nasty bit? There is a notification for each channel that had some activity. If you have many channels, the list of channel names occupy the whole modeline! Goodbye dear Org Clock, goodbye column number!

Or not?

Well absolutely not! I started looking for an Emacs Slack variable to customize, and I discovered the mode uses a third party library for tracking buffers activity: Circe's tracking.el. And they have the variable I was looking for: tracking-max-mode-line-entries! You can limit the "abusive" occupation of the modeline by (setq tracking-max-mode-line-entries 1): this will limit the number of entries in the modeline to 1.

As you can imagine that is insufficient for me, so I immediately try (setq tracking-max-mode-line-entries 0). Unluckily that uncovers a bug: there is still an entry in my modeline. So I need to hack my way through, you can get rid of the function altogether by overwriting the function that generates the modeline string (defun tracking-status () nil).

That really felt a hack, so I also opened an issue and now a PR to allow fellow distraction-free users to have it their way.

In my fixing effort I also discovered there is an alternative testing library for Emacs from the same author of Circe: https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/emacs-buttercup. I will likely write something about it because I like testing and I typically use ERT which comes by default.

Keep your state of flow distraction free! Here I showed how for me that means to keep my modeline free from Slack notifications, and I hope you find your own peace of mind while you are at work.

I wish you mindful hacking!