How to Quote Text in Slack (Ctrl+Shift+9)

Ctrl+Shift+9 — Cmd+Shift+9 on macOS — formats the selection as a blockquote, rendered with a vertical bar down the left edge. Typing > followed by a space at the start of a line does the same thing as you type. **The typed route is why almost nobody knows the shortcut exists.** The > convention carries over from email and from markdown, so people who want to quote something reach for it instinctively and it works. The keyboard combination is genuinely more useful in the case that matters most, though: quoting text you have already pasted. Selecting several pasted lines and pressing Ctrl+Shift+9 quotes all of them at once, where the typed route means inserting > at the start of every line by hand. **Blockquote formatting solves a real problem in channels.** Pasting someone's message into a reply without marking it produces a wall of text where the reader cannot tell which words are yours and which are theirs. A quote block makes the boundary visible at a glance. This matters most in the situations where being misread is expensive — quoting a decision to confirm it, quoting a specification to question it, quoting someone to disagree with a specific sentence rather than their whole position. **It is not the same as Slack's own quote-reply.** Hovering a message and choosing to quote it inserts a formatted reference including the author and a link back to the original. That is better whenever you are quoting something inside Slack, because it preserves attribution and lets the reader jump to the context. The blockquote shortcut is for text from elsewhere: an email, a document, a ticket, a specification — anything with no Slack message to link to. **Quotes and other formatting combine.** Bold, italic, inline code and strikethrough all work inside a blockquote, which is genuinely useful for the common case of quoting a passage and emphasising the specific clause you are responding to. The quote establishes what is being discussed; the emphasis inside it points at the part that matters. **Multi-line behaviour follows the block.** Once a quote is started, subsequent lines stay inside it until you leave, so a multi-paragraph quotation formats as one continuous block rather than needing repeated markers. Getting out is the same problem as with code blocks — the down arrow past the end, or a click below it, moves the cursor back into ordinary text. **A note on threads.** In a busy channel the better answer is often a thread rather than a quote: replying in a thread attaches your response to the message directly, with no ambiguity and no duplication of text. Quoting is for when the thing you are responding to did not happen in Slack, or when you are pulling one line out of a much longer message and the rest is not relevant. **Nested quotes are not supported.** Slack has one level of blockquote, so a quotation containing another quotation flattens into a single block. For an email chain where the nesting carries meaning, a code block preserves the original characters — including the > markers — more faithfully than a blockquote does, which is an unusual but genuinely useful application of code formatting to something that is not code.