How to sign into Slack on KDE

You may have noticed that using the slack app on a KDE desktop doesn't always allow you to sign in. Personally I've had zero success opening a slack magic link via XDG-Open without some extra steps. This guide will walk you through those extra steps and explain why they are needed.

Slack uses magic links as a method of authentication, an example of which looks like this:

slack://Z1D5D9WGH/magic-login/4578555322239-2f2567434f421423b2ac22233ff233d233234e23333ae3332dd66d233527b9ff98339g2

The problem we have in KDE is with a bug that converts the first section of the link to lowercase: slack://z1d5d9wgh/magic-login/xxxxxx which obviously slack doesn't recognise.

The best way i've found to detect the url is to create a while loop in my terminal which listens for xdg-open calls that contain the word magic:

while sleep .1; do ps aux | grep slack | grep -v grep | grep magic; done

Once this loop is running, if you open slack and proceed through the sign in process, once you hit the open xdg-open button the magic link will be outputted in your terminal

As you can see the first part of the magic link is lower case, which is what's causing the problem. So simply copy the magic link to a text editor and upper case the first part, then copy the whole link to your clipboard and select the slack app and BOOM! you're signed into your slack space.

Rinse and repeat for any additional spaces you have.

Closing notes:

The fact I have to write this blog coupled with the fact that the above bug was opened in 2020 and it STILL hasn't been fixed suggests to me this isn't high on the list of priorities to be fixed. So I hope this blog post can help those who aren't aware of this actually sign into slack without losing the will to live over a silly little bug. Enjoy!