Prompted by Aaron Parecki’s efforts, I set out to conjure up a system to set my Slack status when I’m in a Zoom meeting.

Like this:

The secret sauces turned out to be:

• Slack status updater, a well-documented shell script that allows setting Slack status.
• Hammerspoon, a Lua-based Mac automation tool that the Slack status updater includes a helper for.

After configuring everything up, every time I start a Zoom meeting my Slack status gets updated to “In a zoom meeting,” and when the meeting ends it gets removed.

Automation for the win!