Slack keyboard shortcuts for Mac

Slack's real speed comes from never touching the sidebar with a mouse. The four arrow-key chords below cover moving between conversations and skipping straight to the unread ones, and between them they replace most of the clicking an average day contains.

One absence is worth flagging, because you will find it on every other list: ⌘K, usually described as jump-to-conversation, does not appear in Slack's own Mac reference. Slack documents ⌘G for search and ⌘⇧K for browsing DMs. We have left ⌘K out rather than repeat a chord we cannot source, and the two that are documented cover the same ground.

Slack's named views each have a chord, and they are worth learning as a set rather than one at a time — the pattern is ⌘⇧ plus a letter from the view's name in most cases.

The last four rows are the ones that make Slack usable without a pointer. F6 and ⇧F6 cycle focus between the sidebar, the message list and the composer, which is what the single-letter message actions further down this page depend on. ⌥ and a click on any sidebar section header expands or collapses all of them at once.

The two Escape shortcuts are the ones to learn first. Esc clears the unread state in the conversation you are looking at; ⇧Esc clears it everywhere, which is the fastest honest way to start a morning. The last three rows apply inside the All unreads view.

Everything that creates something rather than navigates to it. ⌘⇧Enter for a snippet is the one worth knowing if you paste code or logs into Slack regularly, because it stops a long paste from flooding a channel.

⌘⇧N creates a canvas rather than a message, and canvases have an entirely separate shortcut set of their own further down this page. ⌘O uploads a file from disk; ⌘⇧J opens the list of everything you have downloaded out of Slack, which is where an attachment goes when you cannot find it again.

These apply to selected text in the message box. ⇧Enter is the one non-formatting entry in the group and the one people most often want: it starts a new line instead of sending the message.

⌘⇧C and ⌘⌥⇧C are the pair worth getting right: the first wraps a short span in inline code, the second turns a selection into a fenced block. ⌘⇧F toggles Slack's formatting behaviour itself, so if your asterisks have stopped becoming bold, that is the switch that changed.

The single-letter shortcuts only fire when a message is in focus — hover over it, or move to it with the arrow keys — which is why they can be single letters at all. With a cursor in the message box they simply type. They are the fastest way to reply in a thread or save something for later without reaching for the hover toolbar.

The two huddle chords are worth having ready before a call rather than during one. Everything below them moves between workspaces, tabs and windows, and most of it is built on ⌃ rather than ⌘ so it stays clear of the message shortcuts.

Canvases are a separate editing surface with their own shortcut set, and several chords mean something different there than they do in a channel — ⌘⇧H opens find and replace in a canvas but starts a huddle everywhere else.

Slack shortcuts are hard to demonstrate for the same reason they are worth learning: the app moves without anything visibly happening. You skip three channels with ⌥⇧↓ and the person watching your huddle sees the sidebar teleport. Onboarding a team into Slack, or recording a workflow walkthrough, means narrating every chord out loud and hoping your voice keeps pace with your hands.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a keycap on top of everything else. It does not integrate with Slack, installs nothing into it, and does not record video — a huddle screen share or a screen recorder simply captures the display, and the overlay is on the display.