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              TipBITS: Edit Slack Messages More Easily on the Mac

   Adam Engst

   As a professional writer, picky editor, and amateur
   obsessive-compulsive, I try to ensure that everything I write is
   correctly spelled, formatted, and punctuated, no matter the context or
   venue. Within reason, of course'I'm not completely insane.

   If you're like me, it's irksome to hit Return in Messages, say, only to
   realize that you've made a typo or been tripped up by auto-correct.
   When I do that in Messages, I have to either live with the mistake (if
   it's just embarrassing) or correct it with a follow-up message (if it's
   actively confusing), both of which I hate having to do. So Apple, while
   you're taking [1]Matthew Bischoff's and [2]John Gruber's feedback that
   Messages users want a Mark As Unread option, could you also let us edit
   our last message?

   In Slack, on the other hand, it's possible to edit what you write after
   the fact. Early on, you could fix a mistake in the last message by
   pressing the Up arrow in an empty message field to reopen the previous
   message for editing. That was great, and I was a huge fan. At some
   point, however, Slack changed the feature so you had to arrow up and
   then press the E key to start editing. It usually worked, though I
   sometimes had to hover over the message, click the vertical ellipsis
   button, and choose Edit Message from a menu. That jangled my inner
   editor's nerves.

   Happily, an update to the Slack app for the Mac alerted me to the fact
   that there's a preference to control this behavior. I don't know
   exactly when Slack added this preference (it has been there for quite
   some time) or how I ended up with the wrong setting when others did
   not, but if you're in the same boat and find editing Slack messages to
   be unnecessarily difficult, twiddle this setting.

   In Slack, for each of your workspaces, choose Slack > Preferences >
   Accessibility. Scroll to the bottom of the window and in the Keyboard
   section, select the 'Edit your last message' option for how the Up
   arrow key works. Note that Command-Up arrow will always let you edit
   your last message, regardless of your settings.

   By the way, you can also mark messages as unread in Slack. Option-click
   the message whose read state you want to reset, and Slack's New bar
   will appear above it. Conversely, if you want to mark everything in the
   channel as read, press the Esc key.

References

   1. https://matthewbischoff.com/mark-as-unread-for-messages/
   2. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/01/21/mark-as-unread-messages

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