Slack Markdown



  1. Slack is one of my favorite collaboration tools, but it unfortunately does not support composing messages in Markdown. I've always wanted to be able to do this, so this weekend, I got around to writing a Pandoc plugin that converts Markdown to Slack formatting. It’s available here on GitHub: omarish/pandoc-md-to-slack. Calling it a v1 would.
  2. VNote is a Qt-based, free and open source note-taking application, focusing on Markdown now. VNote is designed to provide a pleasant note-taking platform with excellent editing experience. VNote is NOT just a simple editor for Markdown. By providing notes management, VNote makes taking notes in Markdown simpler.
  3. Slack is directly competing with Microsoft Teams, which also supports Markdown, but comes from a company that built its success in rich text. In that context, I get it, even if I and some of Slack.

Tracker uses a version of Markdown (“Tracker-Flavored Markdown”) for description, comments, tasks, blockers and titles. It is very similar to GitHub-Flavored Markdown, which improves upon Standard Markdown in many ways.

Markdown utilizes an easily consumable plaintext syntax to denote rich content elements such as bold/italic items, numbered and bulleted lists, code blocks, headers, and images. Getting started with Markdown is fairly easy. If you’re not familiar with Markdown, it may be worth your while to read Daring Fireball’s Markdown Syntax Guide.

If you want to turn Slack's markdown-like processing off, you have different options depending on where the text is: For text in layout blocks set the type of your text objects to plaintext. For the top-level text field in messages, include a mrkdwn attribute set to false when publishing.

Preview markdown

When you use markdown in a story or epic description or comment field, you can click the Preview tab to see how the markdown will render after you save your changes.

Edit modePreview mode

Basic syntax

The following overview will introduce you to some of the most commonly used Markdown Syntax, which can be used in story descriptions, comments, tasks, blockers and titles (though some fields offer limited support, see Where you can use Markdown).

Styling text

StyleSyntaxExampleOutput
Strikethrough~~ ~~~~I didn't mean to write this~~I didn’t mean to write this
Bold** ** or __ __**I love Tracker** or __I love Tracker__I love Tracker
Italic* * or _ _*I love Tracker* or _I love Tracker_I love Tracker
Bold and Italic*** *** or ___ ___***I love Tracker*** or ___I love Tracker___I love Tracker

Blockquotes

Quote your text with a greater-than angle bracket >

Slack markdown

Links

Create inline links by wrapping text in brackets [ ], then wrapping the URL in parenthesis ( )

Lists

Create bulleted lists by preceding lines of text with - or *

Create numbered lists by preceding each line with a number. Note that lists beginning with an arbitrary number will automatically be converted to start with 1

Create unordered combination and nested ordered lists by indenting lines with four spaces

Headers

Use anywhere from 1-6 hash # characters at the start of the line, corresponding to header levels 1-6

Inline images

Insert inline images using the following syntax

Inline code blocks

To fence off a span of code, wrap the text with backticks

The word `code` has been fenced off with backticks.

You can add syntax highlighting for quite a few languages, including Gherkin, by adding a language name after the opening three backticks of your fenced code block. See our post “Syntax Highlighting- now with more Gherkin” for more details.

For more on mastering Markdown please see Daring Fireball’s Markdown Syntax Guide as well as GitHub’s Guide to Mastering Markdown.

Tables

Add tables by using three or more hyphens to create a header for each column (---), and separate those columns using pipes (|). Optionally, you can use pipes on either end of your table.

The output will render similar to this:

Cat BreedsTemperament
Maine CoonGentle giant
SiameseChatty Cathy
PantherLess gentle giant

Slack Markdown Italics

The cell widths can vary and will not affect the rendered output.

Align the text in your columns to the left, right, or center by adding a colon (:) to the left, right, or on both sides of the hyphens within the header row.

Here’s how the above alignment choices will render:

Cat BreedsColorTemperament
Maine CoonAll typesGentle giant
SiameseBlack and tanChatty Cathy
PantherBlack or tanLess gentle giant

Where you can use Markdown

Description: full Tracker-Flavored Markdown

Activity: full Tracker-Flavored Markdown

Title: only bold, italic, strikethrough, and links

Tasks: only inline Markdown (such as bold, italic, strikethrough, links, story tags, inline code blocks, etc.)

Blockers: full Tracker-Flavored Markdown

Project Profile: full Tracker-Flavored Markdown

Differences from Standard Markdown

New lines

With Standard Markdown, new lines are stripped out between elements, which often causes unintentional formatting issues. Like GitHub-Flavored Markdown, Tracker renders line breaks between content elements as </br> tags, and double line breaks as new paragraphs.

Multiple underscores in words

Markdown interprets * or _ wrapped words and phrases as bold and italic emphasis. Since underscores are often used within text to define method names and variables (e.g., some_method_name), Tracker ignores interior _ and * characters.

URL Auto-linking

Tracker automatically links URLs beginning with http:// or https://. This differs from Standard Markdown, which requires distinct tagging for URLs.

Slack Markdown Not Working

Fenced code blocks and code highlighting

As with GitHub, Tracker enables fenced code blocks by wrapping content with three backticks, whereas Standard Markdown converts text elements prefixed with a tab or spaced text elements to code blocks.

MarkdownNote

Slack Markdown Icons

: Slack

By default, Tracker does not highlight syntax in code blocks. To enable syntax highlighting, add the language name next to the first line of backticks.

@mention autocompletes

Tracker supports mentioning of team members within comments. Tracker will attempt to autocomplete team members’ names when prefixed with the @ symbol.

Story and epic tagging

Slack Markdown Support

Tracker also supports hyperlinking of stories and epics by IDs. Story IDs prefixed with # (e.g., #12345) will link to that story. Epic IDs prefixed with ## (e.g., ##54321) will link to that epic.

Similarly, Tracker will detect story URLs and condense them into their associated IDs.