Img source: Chrome Web Store

Slack recently released a new feature which can be helpful, as it gives you the opportunity to edit texts with a lot more features. It came with the popular WYSIWYG editor, which gives you a lot of features that you can use to enrich the messages that you sent on Slack. This may be something interesting and useful, but it can be something that not everyone needs it.

There are people who may just want to use the plain old editor that it was before. At the time of this writing, going back to the old editor is not an option offered natively by Slack, but a new GitHub repository gives details on how you can disable it which we are going to see down below.

It lists a Chrome and Firefox extension that you can use to do that.

This extension is open source and you can view its source code here.

But maybe you are usually using Slack as a desktop app. If that’s the case, you can download and run the following script.

You can also do that in another way for Mac and other platforms:

  1. Open the slack app in Developer mode
    • On Mac: export SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU=true && open -a /Applications/Slack.app
    • On PC in a Powershell window (per user install): $env:SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU="true"; & "$($env:LOCALAPPDATA)\Slack\slack.exe"
    • On PC in a Powershell window (machine wide install): $env:SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU="true"; & "$($Env:ProgramFiles)\Slack Deployment\slack.exe"
    • On other OS’s: ensure the SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU environment variable is set to true before opening the Slack app.
  2. Right-click in the app and Inspect element
  3. Copy the contents of index.js
  4. Paste into the Console tab
  5. Repeat each time you reload slack or switch to a team for the first time

You can also disable this editor inside Franz. Franz is an Electron-based messaging aggregator application.

  • With Slack opened inside Franz, use the keyboard shortcut to open up the inspector:
    Mac: ⌘ command + ⌥ option + I
    Windows/Linux: ⌃ ctrl + ⇧ shift + I
  • Open up the console tab, and run the following to open up the current Slack instance’s dev console:
    $(".app__service .is-active webview").openDevTools()
  • In the newly opened console window, paste in the script from index.js.

I hope you find this helpful. If you want to see all these steps inside the GitHub repository from which these were taken, you can go here and give it a star.