Slack is a tool that many of us use for communicating with work colleagues. However, it can cause professional embarrassment with its default messaging settings, which send a message every time you hit Enter – making it too easy to send messages that you haven’t thought through or to accidentally strike the Enter key and send half-finished messages. The good news is you can stop Slack sending messages when you press Enter.

Time needed: 2 minutes.

Stop Slack sending messages when you press Enter

Open the Slack app preferences
Fire up Slack on your computer and then click on the name of your workspace in the top-left corner of the screen. Select Preferences from the drop-down menu, as shown here:
Switch Enter key behaviour
In the Preferences screen, select the Advanced tab on the left-hand side. Now, under ‘When writing a message, press Enter to…’ select the ‘Start a new line’ option. You’ll also see a prompt there showing you which key combo you’ll need to press to send a message in your operating system. On Mac it’s Command + Enter, on Windows/Linux it’s Ctrl + Enter.

Note that all of your settings in Slack are workspace-specific. So, if you have multiple Slack workspaces, you’ll need to adjust the preferences in all of them.