Slack All Unreads: Turn It On, Shortcuts, and Clear Everything

To mark all messages as read in Slack, press Shift+Esc and click Yes, Clear All! in the dialog. It clears every channel, DM and Activity item in the workspace, mentions included. Esc marks only the conversation you are on as read. To see what is unread first, open the Unreads view (the old All Unreads): press Cmd+Shift+A on a Mac (Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows), or turn it on in Preferences > Home under Always show in the sidebar. It lists every unread message, grouped by conversation. We tested each step in the Slack web app on 3 October 2026, with a test bot posting 5 unread messages, and read Slack's client.counts before and after.

Turn on Unreads in the sidebar

• Click your workspace name, then Preferences.
• Open Home.
• Under Always show in the sidebar, tick Unreads.

Unreads appeared at the top of the sidebar at once, above Threads. In users.prefs.get this is enable_unread_view, which went from false to true.

The shortcut does not need the setting. With Unreads unticked again, Cmd+Shift+A still opened the Unreads view, and the sidebar showed the Unreads item only while the view was open.

What the Unreads view shows

Our bot posted "unread test 1 of 5" to "5 of 5" in a test channel while we were in another channel. client.counts then reported the channel with has_unreads: true and its last_read behind its latest message. Cmd+Shift+A opened this:

Each conversation is a section with its message count and a Mark as Read button. The two menus at the top filter by conversation type and change the sort order. At the bottom of the list there is a Mark All Messages Read button.

Mark one conversation read with Esc

Pressing Esc did nothing until we clicked inside the first section. After that, Esc collapsed it to "5 messages marked read", with Undo:

client.counts no longer listed the channel as unread. To read or set the same state from code, use last_read and conversations.mark, tested in Slack API unread messages.

Clear all unreads with Shift+Esc

We had the bot post 5 more messages, then pressed Shift+Esc. Slack asked first:

After Yes, Clear All!, client.counts returned no channel and no DM with unreads, and the badges on the app DM and on Activity were gone. "Notifications" in the dialog means that: Activity was cleared too, mentions included. We left Don't ask me again unticked.

One display bug: the open Unreads view kept showing the cleared messages, with a "5 new messages" pill, until we left it and opened it again. Then it showed "There! Caught up." If the view still lists messages after you cleared them, reopen it before you assume the clear failed.

When unreads will not go away

Shift+Esc cleared everything in our test, so we could not reproduce a stuck unread here. Thread badges and the red dot have their own causes, tested on Slack shows unread messages when there are none and Slack red dot won't go away. Other shortcuts are on Slack keyboard shortcuts.

To send a single message back to unread instead of clearing everything, Alt-click it (Option-click on a Mac); our mark as unread test shows what Slack stores and what clears it.

Questions

Is Shift+Esc only for the channel I am in? No. In our test it cleared every channel, DM and Activity item in the workspace. Use Esc in the Unreads view for one conversation.

Can I undo Shift+Esc? The dialog has no undo button, and no Undo toast appeared after we confirmed. Single-conversation Esc in the Unreads view does show Undo.