How to Strike Through Text in Slack (Ctrl+Shift+X)

Select text in the Slack message box and press Ctrl+Shift+X — Cmd+Shift+X on macOS. Wrapping the words in tildes, like ~this~, does the same as you type. **Slack uses one tilde where most markdown uses two.** GitHub, Discord and CommonMark's strikethrough extension all expect ~~double tildes~~. Slack takes a single tilde on each side. It is the same class of divergence as single-asterisk bold, and it produces the same result for anyone moving between the two: syntax that works everywhere else silently fails here, leaving visible tildes in the sent message. **Strikethrough carries a specific social meaning in a channel.** Unlike bold or italic, which adjust emphasis, striking text through says *this was true and now is not*, while leaving the original visible. That is why it appears constantly in task lists and status updates: an item struck through communicates completion and history at once, in a way that deleting the line does not. Anyone reading the message later sees both what was planned and what changed. **It is often the better alternative to editing.** Slack allows editing sent messages, but an edit rewrites the record — someone reading afterwards sees only the final version and has no idea a change happened unless they check the edit marker. Striking through the outdated part and adding the correction keeps both visible in one message. For a channel where people scroll back to reconstruct what was decided, that visible history is worth more than a tidy final state. **It combines with the other formats.** Bold strikethrough, italic strikethrough, and both together all work by applying the shortcuts in sequence to the same selection. In practice bold strikethrough is the useful combination — it draws attention to something specifically because it has been cancelled, which is exactly the case where a reader skimming past would otherwise act on stale information. **It does not apply inside code formatting.** Inline code and code blocks render characters literally, so a tilde in a snippet stays a tilde. That matters more than it sounds for shell examples, where `~` means the home directory and any reinterpretation would corrupt the path being shared. **If the shortcut appears dead**, check focus and selection. Formatting acts on the message box, so if you have clicked into a channel list or a thread pane, the keystroke goes somewhere else. And with no text selected, the shortcut arms strikethrough for what you type next rather than changing anything already present — which reads as failure until you type a character and see it struck through. **One thing strikethrough cannot do is un-notify.** Striking through a line in a message that has already sent does not retract the notification anyone received, and someone reading a preview on a phone sees the text without the styling. For a genuine correction to something time-sensitive — a wrong meeting time, a wrong link — a fresh message saying so plainly reaches people that an edit to an old one does not. **In checklists, consider the alternative.** Slack supports proper checkbox lists in canvases, where an item can be genuinely ticked rather than visually crossed out. For a running list that several people update, that is a better fit than a message edited repeatedly with more tildes each time.