How to Send a Spoiler in Signal (Ctrl+Shift+B)

Select text in the Signal Desktop composer and press Ctrl+Shift+B — Cmd+Shift+B on macOS — to mark it as a spoiler. The recipient sees a blurred block they tap or click to reveal, rather than the text itself. **This is a display treatment, not a security feature, and the distinction matters.** The text is delivered normally, stored normally, and revealed by anyone who taps it. It is not encrypted differently, not restricted, and not recoverable from the recipient once sent. What it protects against is accidental reading — the glance at a notification, the scroll through a group thread, the message opened on a shared screen. That is a real problem, and it is the one spoiler formatting solves. **Where it earns its place.** Plot details in a group where not everyone has watched the thing. A sports result someone is deliberately avoiding until they can watch a recording. A surprise that a notification preview would otherwise ruin before the message is even opened. In each case the reader can choose to see it, which is exactly the affordance a plain text message cannot offer. **Formatting applies to a selection, not the whole message.** You can write a sentence of context in plain text and hide only the part that spoils something, which is usually better than blurring everything and leaving the recipient with no idea whether the message is worth revealing. 'Finished the last episode — ' in plain text followed by the spoilered detail gives someone enough to decide. **It travels across platforms.** Signal sends formatting as message metadata rather than as literal characters, so a spoiler composed on Desktop arrives as a spoiler on Android and iOS, with the same tap-to-reveal behaviour. This is different from apps that interpret markdown-style syntax at display time, where formatting can break if something does not parse or if the recipient's client is older. **The rest of the formatting set shares the same mechanics.** Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italic, Ctrl+Shift+X for strikethrough, Ctrl+E for monospace. All apply to selected text in the composer, all combine, and all use Cmd instead of Ctrl on macOS. Of the group, monospace is the one most worth a habit if you send anything technical — it stops l and 1 being confused and preserves spacing that proportional text would collapse. **If the shortcut seems inert**, focus is the usual explanation rather than the binding itself. Formatting keys act on the composer, and after navigating the chat list or selecting a message, focus is elsewhere. Ctrl+T cycles focus between regions of the window and is the standard fix. The other possibility is that nothing is selected — the combination needs a selection to act on, and pressing it with the cursor merely placed in the text does nothing visible. **A small workflow point.** Because formatting acts on a selection, the path of least resistance is to write the message first and then select and format, rather than toggling the style on before typing the words. Shift with the arrow keys selects from the cursor without involving the mouse, so marking a phrase as a spoiler is a couple of keystrokes once the sentence exists. Toggling formatting on mid-flow tends to leave it applied to more text than intended, which is the usual explanation for a message that arrives with the wrong half hidden.