Alain Lafon, who, as I’ve said before, is an Emacs master, has a very interesting post on Emacs and messaging apps such as Skype and Slack and many others. One of the major problems with them from his point of view is that their text entering facilities are terrible. If you’re going to be entering a lot of text—or even a little, actually—the last thing you want is a brain-dead interface with unfamiliar keybindings for editing. What we Emacsers really want is to be able to enter text in Emacs with its powerful and familiar editing commands.
His idea is to link these apps to IRC—and hence to ERC—and deal with them through Emacs. The way to do that is to use BitlBee and libpurple to act as a bridge to IRC. BitlBee is the bridge between IRC and messaging apps and libpurple provides the core of IM apps, dealing with the IM protocols and other low level details. Follow the links if you want more information.
Although you can install BitlBee and libpurple directly, Lafon prefers to run them from a Docker image. His post gives detailed instructions for setting up the Docker image. Once you’ve got things set up with either method, you can conduct your conversations with the IRC client of your choice. If you pick one of the Emacs IRC clients, you’ve moved another function—or perhaps several other functions—inside Emacs.