Slack Text Formatting Shortcuts

Bold (Ctrl+B / Cmd+B) wraps the selected text in asterisks, which render as bold text once sent, or immediately as you type if your workspace's compose box has rich text formatting mode enabled rather than showing the raw Markdown characters while composing. Inline code (Ctrl+Shift+C) wraps a selection in backticks, rendering it in a monospace font with a subtle background — the right choice for a short reference within a normal sentence, like a filename, a variable name, or a single command, distinct from a full code block meant for multi-line content. A code block (Ctrl+Shift+Enter in many versions, or manually typing triple backticks around a multi-line selection) preserves line breaks and formatting for pasted multi-line code, which inline code formatting doesn't handle well since it visually strips line breaks — pasting a multi-line snippet with inline code formatting collapses it visually in a way that a proper code block avoids entirely. Bulleted lists (Ctrl+Shift+8) convert the current line into a bulleted list item, and Slack keeps auto-continuing the bullet format on each subsequent Enter press until you either press Enter twice in a row on an empty bullet or manually delete the bullet formatting — the same general auto-continuing list mechanic found in several other apps covered on this site, like Notion's typed Markdown shortcuts. Italic (Ctrl+I / Cmd+I) wraps the selection in single underscores, and strikethrough (Ctrl+Shift+X) wraps it in tildes — strikethrough specifically is commonly used to visibly retract or correct a statement within a message rather than deleting and retyping it entirely, which preserves the correction's context for anyone reading back through the thread later and wondering what changed. Blockquotes, formed by typing a right-angle bracket followed by a space at the start of a line, visually indent the line with a vertical bar along its left edge — commonly used to reference or requote something someone else said in an earlier message before responding to it directly beneath the quote, giving a reply clearer context without needing to manually copy and reformat the original text. A point worth understanding about how these interact: Slack's Markdown-like formatting only applies within a single message's composition — formatting doesn't persist as a saved 'style' the way a Word document's character styles might, so each new message starts from plain text again, with these shortcuts applied fresh to whatever you're currently typing rather than carrying forward any prior message's formatting choices automatically. Combining multiple formatting shortcuts on the same selection works the same way it does in most text editors — selecting a phrase and pressing both Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I applies bold and italic together, wrapping the text in both sets of Markdown characters simultaneously (asterisks and underscores nested together) rather than one overriding the other, since Slack tracks each formatting attribute independently on the underlying text. One practical difference from a full word processor worth calling out: Slack's rich text composer, when enabled, shows formatting applied visually as you type (bold text actually appears bold in the compose box rather than showing literal asterisks), but the underlying message still stores and transmits the Markdown-style syntax — this matters if you're ever building an integration or bot that posts messages programmatically, since formatting a bot-posted message correctly means writing the same asterisk/underscore/backtick syntax directly into the message text rather than relying on any rich-text API equivalent to these keyboard shortcuts.