This article was published on March 17, 2020

How to get rid of the annoying expandable hyperlinks on Slack

It's annoying but you can fix it


How to get rid of the annoying expandable hyperlinks on Slack

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff.

Slack recently made a minor change to the way it handles links that’s been driving me insane. I’m talking about expandable hyperlinks.

[Read: How to use Chrome’s media controls to easily switch between videos and podcasts]

You might’ve noticed that if you copy-paste a snippet of text with a hyperlink, Slack now keeps the formatting, and you can actually click on the hyperlink once you post. The problem is that along with the hyperlink, you’ll also get a link preview — and if you copy-paste a lot of paragraphs with hyperlinks, those expansions get annoying real quick.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

That’s three (!!!) link previews in one copy-pasted paragraph.

One way to deal with this nuisance is to disable expanding links from settings altogether. The thing is: I like expanding links when I intentionally insert a link, but I find it annoying when it happens when I’m pasting a snippet of texts that includes a hyperlink I’m too lazy to remove manually.

Of course, I can always manually close the preview once pasted, but that’s one extra click (per hyperlink) I’m not willing to make. The pleasure of copy-pasting is that I don’t have to do anything. So I want an equally effortless solution.

Unfortunately, you won’t find a solution to this problem in settings, but there’s an old workaround you can take advantage of: Copy-pasting without formatting.

Here’s how it’s done:

  • Copy any snippet of text as you normally would.
  • Open Slack.
  • Paste the text holding Command + Shift + V (or Control + Shift + V on Windows).
  • Boom, the text is pasted but stripped of any formatting.

No hyperlinks. No unwanted previews. Glorious.

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