Message Formatting
Slack offers the following formatting options for messages:
- Surround text with
*asterisks*for bold face - Surround text with
_underscores_for italics - Place a > at the beginning of a line to indent text as a blockquote
- Surround text with single backticks (`) for
inline fixed-width text like this - Surround text with triple backticks (```) to create a block of
pre-formatted, fixed-width text. These text blocks can span multiple lines!
We will not do any additional formatting inside of either of the fixed-width formats. Also, note that mobile is not yet supported: formatting will only appear on the desktop version of Slack. We'll extend support for formatted messages to the mobile clients soon.
FAQ
Why didn’t you use Markdown syntax?
There are lots of normal humans who use Slack and many of them already do things like *add asterisks* around words they want to emphasize. It is also used in many other popular programs, such as Google Talk. It’s not easy to please everyone here and since it is formatting that is interpreted at display time and not markup in the text, we had to choose one way or the other.
Why don’t you support [tables/headings/colors/strikethrough/inline images/blink text/________]?
These are still messages and that’s more structure than it makes sense to have in messages. Our posts feature will be improved at some point in the not too distant future (we know it’s pretty sucky right now) and the display of those posts inline will also be much improved (also quite sucky right now). That should give you lots of power to putting more structured “documents” into the flow of channels.
How come there is no syntax highlighting for pre-formatted blocks?
Syntax highlighting is computationally expensive (relative to simple display of pre-formatted text) and we already have snippets. And, the sucky-ness of our inline snippet display (see above) will be rectified before too long as well.
Can I add formatting to bot messages?
Yup! See the "Reduced Markdown Message Formatting" section at https://api.slack.com/docs/formatting.