Channel history is useful, but despite slack's new message notification system, I find myself unnecessarily scanning old parts of a conversation frequently, and would like to hide it from the screen.
Is there a slack command or technique to hide on-screen messages, or to push them above the fold, once I am finished reading messages in a channel?
Shell Terminal applications and IRC clients implement this functionality, and it's very useful to suppress distractions.
This kind of feature is not supported by Slack.
I got in touch with them, and this is the official response:
Unfortunately, the option to hide on screen messages is not something we currently offer with Slack, although I see how useful this feature could be. I'm happy to pass this along as a suggestion to the team for future consideration! My apologies we don't currently offer this feature or something similar. (Amie, Slack Support)
I wanted this too, to begin to look for messages from the clear point (like we do in terminal with CMD-K).
My solution to this is very specific to my case (waiting for a Slackbot to respoind to some action I've taken elsewhere). I add a new message at the clear point in the public channel, something like ---- MERGED PR INTO K8 DEPLOY ---- which could just be a horizontal line or a Slackmoji, too.
While what you are asking is exactly not possible, until Slack makes a feature around this. Until then though, you could possibly make use of Channel Tools.
It comes with a /clear command. When executed, it pushes all the existing messages one full screen up. Thereby, creating some breathing space and clearing screen in the API's limitations.
Before:
After:
Because it creates an ephemeral message, all the changes are only visible to the user executing the command.
