Copy Text From Slack With Formatting (or Without It)

To copy a Slack message with its formatting, hover over the message, open More actions (the three dots) and choose Copy message, or select the text and press Cmd+C (Ctrl+C on Windows). When we copied a selected message this way, Slack put four versions on the clipboard, including a markdown version, and the app you paste into picks the one it understands. On October 27, 2026 we copied a test message with bold, italics, strikethrough, inline code, a link, an emoji, a bulleted list and a code block in Slack's web app, and read every version Slack produced.

The four formats Slack puts on the clipboard

We selected the whole message, fired the browser's copy event on it and listed what Slack's copy handler wrote: text/plain, text/html, text/markdown and slack/html.

Markdown. This is the useful one for docs, GitHub, Notion or an AI chat. It came out as standard markdown, not Slack's own *bold* style:

Release notes: **bold**, *italic*, ~~struck~~, `inline code`, a [link](https://slack.green/en/tools/markdown-to-slack) and :tada:

- first item
- second item

The code block followed as a normal fenced block: a line of three backticks, npm run build, echo done, and a closing line of three backticks.

Bold became **bold**, strikethrough ~~struck~~, the link a normal [link](url), and the list - items. The emoji stayed as its :tada: code.

Plain text. Every formatting mark is gone. Links keep only their text, so the URL is lost:

Release notes: bold, italic, struck, inline code, a link and :tada:

first item
second item
npm run build
echo done

HTML. Bold, italics, strikethrough, inline code, the link and the list all came through as HTML tags with inline styles, and the emoji as an image. Rich text editors such as Google Docs, Word or an email composer usually read this version.

slack/html is Slack's own copy of the rendered message. Only Slack reads it.

Pasting it back into Slack

We pasted each version back into a Slack message box (we sent the paste event ourselves, so the owner's real clipboard stayed untouched):

This differs from our September 28 test for Slack markdown not working, where pasted **bold** and [text](url) stayed literal. Slack's paste handling seems to have changed since then, or the result depends on how the paste arrives, so check the message box before you send.

Pasting markdown gave the closest copy of the original:

The plain text version came back flat:

If formatting does not appear after a paste, that page also covers the Format messages with markup setting and the Apply formatting prompt.

How to copy from Slack without formatting

Paste with Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows. In most apps that pastes the plain text version shown above. A plain text field, such as a terminal or a code editor, takes the plain text version on its own. The catch is the links: plain text keeps only the link text, so copy links one at a time with Copy link if you need the URLs.

Copy as markdown, then convert

Because Slack writes standard markdown, the copied text drops straight into GitHub, Notion, Obsidian or a README. Going the other way, from a markdown file into a Slack message or a bot, the Markdown to Slack converter turns standard markdown into Slack's mrkdwn and shows a live preview. To build formatted text by hand, the Slack message formatter does the same in the browser.

FAQ

Why does my pasted Slack text lose the links?

The app you pasted into took the plain text version, which keeps the link text and drops the URL. Paste into an app that accepts HTML or markdown, or copy each link with Copy link.

Does Copy message include replies in the thread?

We copied single messages only. For a whole thread, how to copy a Slack thread shows the methods we tested.