Comment by JasonSage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JasonSage | Hacker News Reader

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I'm actually more at ease with this change than if there was no default text. There's that flicker of recognition when I look at the input area before I start typing—"I'm messaging @channel." Call me paranoid, but I often flick over to the sidebar to see which channel I'm in before I dive into some conversations, just to make sure I'm not saying something in a public channel I shouldn't—like scanning over the recipients before you send an email. This proactively reassures me so I don't have to flit about making sure I'm doing the right thing.

That's a great point. Looking at it again, maybe it's just the wording of the prompt that I don't like. For example, we have a #dev channel and it says:

  Message dev

It doesn't quite register for me that the word "dev" is referring to the channel name - it's drowned out by the big word "Message".

And my first subconscious thought is that "Message" is being used as an adjective: are we talking about the "Message dev"? Who is that?

I think it would be helpful if the prompt used the standard notation for channel names:

  Message #dev

But if I had a prompt like this I'd probably spell it out in full to avoid any confusion:

  Send a message to #dev

On my Windows Slack client, it says "Message #general". Same when I log into Slack via Firefox.

A private channel will look like

  Message dev

But an org-wide channel will look like

  Message #dev

Mystery solved, thanks! I was looking at a private channel. I didn't realize that private channels don't get #xyz shortcuts.

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