onium 0.4.7

Onium - Inject hebrew support into a slack desktop app

Onium is a small utility to inject Hebrew support (automatic RTL) into Slack’s desktop app. It uses one of two methods: 1. Inject - Using Electron’s debug API to inject a Chrome plugin into the Electron app. 2. Edit - Modifying Slack’s app.asar (Slack application code) and changes the Slack app itself.

What is Onium?

Onium fixes one of Slack’s most glaring issues for users in countries whose script is written Right-to-left. It does so by injecting code into Slack that modifies the displayed text to correctly show Right-to-left words.

The Slack app is built using Electron, which essentially wraps a Chromium browser and a Node.js server together. Onium modifies the HTML displayed by the Chromium browser to properly support Hebrew (and RTL) languages.

Onium does this by either modifying Slack’s internal code (creating a “Fixed” solution), or by injecting the code into Slack (A temporary, but more resillient solution).

Onium uses Shlomi Matichin’s excellent slack_hebrew plugin.

Requirements

You need Python 2.7 or 3.5 or later to run Onium. Onium should work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Quick start

Onium can be installed using pip:

$ python -m pip install onium

As long as python’s scripts folder is in your path, simply run

$ onium [inject]

or

$ onium edit

Usage

Onium supports various command line parameters

usage: onium [-h] [-l LOCATION] [-a APP] [--no-kill] [--no-start]
             [-s {old,new}] [--update | --no-update]
             {inject,edit} ...

Inject hebrew support plugin into Slack's tab inside an electron app. This
program injects the Chrome's hebrew_slack plugin into any electron (desktop)
version of the slack app

positional arguments:
  {inject,edit}
    inject              Use the injection method - run slack with debugging
                        support and inject the hebrew scripts at runtime
    edit                Use the edit method - modify Slack's on-disk files to
                        permanently inject the hebrew support

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l LOCATION, --location LOCATION
                        Location of application to run, or auto, local (Windows only),
                        store (Windows only) [default: auto]
  --no-kill             Do not attempt to kill original application before
                        starting
  --no-start            Do not attempt to start application (assume already
                        running)
  -s {old,new}, --script {old,new}
                        Which script to inject to Slack [default: new]
  --update              Update the slack plugin from slack_hebrew github page
  --no-update           Do not update the slack plugin

The inject command accepts the following arguments

usage: onium inject [-h] [-t TIME] [-p PORT]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t TIME, --time TIME  Wait for application to load for timeout seconds
                        before injecting [default: 15]
  -p PORT, --port PORT  Port on which application is listening to debug
                        interface [default: 9222]

The edit command accepts the following arguments

usage: onium edit [-h] [-b BACKUP] [-f]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -b BACKUP, --backup BACKUP
                        Name to use save original slack app backup. This will
                        never overwrite an existing backup file. Fails if file
                        already exists and not used with -f [default:
                        app.asar.orig]
  -f, --force           Proceed even if backup file already exists [default:
                        False]

Contribute / Join the conversation

Onium is an open-source project distributed under the MIT license. Basically means go wild.

Development is taking place at https://github.com/yonatan-mitmit/onium

Please report issues here

License

Onium is licensed under the terms of the MIT License (see the file LICENSE.txt).

Acknowledgement

Shlomi Matichin for his slack_hebrew plugin

Yuval Raz and Lital Lechtman for Mac port and testing

Ami Chayun for Linux port