There are faster ways to use Slack. And once you’ve used these shortcuts a couple of times it will become like second nature for you to use a shortcut instead of doing things the manual way.
There are a huge amount of keyboard shortcuts for Slack, and we’ve scrolled through them a lot ourselves. So we thought of giving you a more comprehensive list of our favourite (most useful) shortcuts for Slack below.
We’ve included our top ten time savers:
- Set your status
- Upload a file
- View all downloaded files
- Create a new snippet
- Search in the current conversation
- Toggle mute on a Slack call
- Jump to next unread DM or channel
- Mark all messages as read
- Pin or unpin a message
- Create a reminder about a message
Tip: In case you didn’t know, you can see the full list of Slack shortcuts within the Slack app by clicking Command + / on Mac, or Ctrl + / on Windows.
Set your status
Setting your status is something that we do here at JOIN several times a day. It’s one of our favourites because it’s so simple, but so useful.
You can set your status to essentially whatever you like. Out for lunch, walking the dog, on the way to the office, out for a walk, focus time, in a meeting, on a call, coffee break, remote working, etc.
If you’d like to see the emoji library we use most here at JOIN, head over to our article on emojis and polls.
Instead of going manually to your profile and then updating status, you can use this shortcut. If you’re anything like us, it will become one of your most-used shortcuts at work:
Mac | Windows |
Shift + Command + Y | Ctrl + Shift + Y |
Upload a file
Uploading a file in Slack makes it that little bit easier to access things and keep track of everything shared.
There’s something satisfying about not having to use more than a few apps during the day to get all of your work done. So, if you have documents, images, e-books, spreadsheet files, or presentations, you can use this shortcut to access them easily.
Slack displays your last few downloads for even easier access, too.
Mac | Windows |
Command + U | Ctrl + U |
View all downloaded files
I dread to think about the number of hours I’ve spent during my professional life just simply trying to locate that rogue document. I swear I had it in that file, but it’s definitely disappeared forever (and it certainly was my computer’s mistake and not mine).
Thank goodness for the ‘view all downloaded files’ shortcut so that I can stop asking the same people over and over to resend that file they sent last week.
Mac | Windows |
Shift + Command + J | Ctrl + Shift + J |
Create a snippet
If you’re a programmer, or working with developers, you should find the ‘create a snippet’ shortcut really useful.
It allows our developers to discuss best practices for coding, as well as finding and fixing bugs and offering suggestions and improvements to sections of code without editing.
Mac | Windows |
Shift + Command + Enter | Ctrl + Shift + Enter |
Search in the current conversation
It’s easy to get lost in conversations. So being able to search within one to find what you’re looking for can save you all that annoying time scrolling back through the messages wondering ‘what did they say about that project in the end?’
This is one of the most useful shortcuts for me as it’s difficult to keep track when so much is going on. Especially within a fast-paced startup environment that changes all the time and where many decisions are being made at once.
I find it really easy to tap my little Search Conversation shortcut, and just remember one or two keywords, so I can stop wracking my brain and get down to the action plans.
Mac | Windows |
Command + F | Ctrl + F |
Toggle mute on a Slack call
If you’re using Slack calls to catch up with remote workers or external colleagues then you’ll want to be able to quickly toggle your mute button so that no one becomes distracted by the background noise.
Mac | Windows |
M | M |
Jump to next unread DM or channel
This shortcut will make it that tiny bit faster to navigate Slack in general.
If your Slack is consistently busy with questions and conversations from many different people and channels, it would be great to be able to jump around those conversations quicker. This keyboard shortcut will become second nature to you.
Mac | Windows |
Options + Shift + Down | Alt + Shift + Down |
Mark all messages as read
Now, this shortcut isn’t one of our best practices, but it’s definitely useful in some situations. Maybe you’ve had a conversation with someone in person, so you don’t need to read the messages in Slack.
Maybe you’ve been on vacation, in which case it’s much easier to have an update meeting, instead of scrolling through hundreds of messages to catch up.
Marking all messages as read made the list because it’s just simply so much faster than opening all the channels individually to mark a message as read.
Mac | Windows |
Shift + Esc | Shift + Esc |
Pin or unpin a message
Pinning a message makes navigating back through the forest of messages, files and important information a breeze. Once you’ve pinned a message to a channel with the shortcut, you can get an overview of all the pinned messages per channel.
Think you’re definitely going to forget that spreadsheet link? Pin the message and get easy access later.
Note that to use this shortcut, you first need to hover over the three dots for ‘more options’ in the message you want to pin.
Mac | Windows |
P | P |
Create a reminder about a message
Reminders serve a similar purpose as pinning a message. It gives you an opportunity to catch up on the things you missed at a more convenient time.
To do this, go to the message that you’d like to be reminded about, click on the three dots, and scroll to ‘create a reminder about this message’. You can then press ‘M’ to set a custom reminder time.
Mac | Windows |
M | M |
Slack is making it much faster for us to communicate with each other at work, and shortcuts just make our work lives that tiny bit easier.