Discord Life Hacks — Super, Not So Secret, UI Tricks
Ever open up the Discord app on your PC and think to yourself “I wish there was an easier way to edit my last message”? Maybe you go to delete spam messages in a channel and are greeted with an annoying confirmation on every message. These are just two of the things I will be covering in this article of ways to leverage Discord’s UI to your advantage with keyboard shortcuts and simple mouse tricks. Greetings reader and welcome to Community Builders Blog’s very first Discord Life Hacks article.
If you do not yet know what a “life hack” is, here is a brief explanation:
“Life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.” — Wikipedia
Which simply translates to “ways to make life easier” and this is our goal in these articles. Everything we write here are purely suggestions, and at least one member of our team has tried and tested each one. So, without further delay, let’s get into what I’ll be covering in our first one!
Disclaimer: This article contains information related to the Discord application for the PC Windows platform and most of it will work on the macOS version. None of it will work on Android or iOS devices due to the completely different nature of the platforms.
The Power of Clicking
Have you ever noticed how much you can do just by clicking? We execute most of our daily tasks on a PC clicking a mouse, and that’s no different for Discord. This section will show some of the great Discord life hacks you can achieve by just a click of the mouse.
Hack #1 — The right-click menu
There are many menus that some people are completely unaware of in Discord, so our first Discord Life Hack is more of a tip than a hack, but still a very valid one to have in here.
Never be afraid of right-clicking! Right-click menus save you time for what is important; chatting with friends and building strong community bonds.
When right-clicking a server icon or server name, you will be able to access the Server Menu. With this you can: quickly mark an entire server as read, invite people to join the server, mute the server indefinitely or for a certain amount of time, and much more. Where this really shines is the Server Settings quick-menu which allows you to access all your server-related options without traversing the full UI page. Now you can make edits to roles or add more emojis faster just by doing a few quick clicks.
Continuing with the trend of easy access via right-clicking, let’s look at channels. Whenever you right-click a channel, you will be able to: quickly mark it as read, access the channel settings by clicking Edit Channel, quickly mute a channel to avoid text spams, or make a channel notify you for every message sent in it. You can even delete a channel without going into the channel settings, so no one will see those accidental Text Channel creates when you meant to make a Voice Channel.
The last example, and possibly most unknown one of all, is the ability to right-click the cogwheel that is found at the bottom of the application to access app settings and your own user settings. By right-clicking here, you get a quick menu instead of opening the full application menu. Every setting you would have access to via the full UI menu is in this quick menu. Check out the GIF to see it in action!
You can see from these examples why right-clicking is so important when using Discord. It doesn’t stop at these three menus either, as you can also right-click messages, users, and even server folders. Go out there and see what secrets you can discover with right-clicking!
Hack #2 - Just a click away!
Following up with the right-click, let’s look at clicking in general. If you click certain parts of the UI or hold a key while clicking, you can achieve a few extra things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Let’s have a closer look at these little life hacks.
As you can see from the above image, you can quickly copy your username and discriminator (name#1234) simply by left-clicking on your name. This little clicking trick also has a fun Easter egg if you keep clicking your name repeatedly up to ten times.
This next hack I only discovered recently, and I was quite shocked that after all my years on Discord I did not know this is possible. By simply holding down the shift key while clicking “Delete Message”, the confirmation prompt won’t pop-up. This allows for quick deleting of messages without having to confirm each one, or using a Discord bot which may come with its own difficulties. This trick works with the right-click menu as well.
Discord added shortcuts for text formatting recently. Simply highlight the text you want to format and a text editing toolbox will pop-up above it. This allows you to quickly style your text any way you want with a click of the mouse!
As you can see from all the above examples, there are many ways that using your mouse can make Discord easier to use. Some require holding down an extra key; others differ between left- or right-click, but all of it comes down to exploring the possibilities available to you by clicking as your mouse is one of the most powerful tools you can have in your arsenal when mastering the Discord App.
Button Smashing Fun Keyboard Shortcuts
Moving on from all the exciting things you can do using your mouse, it’s time to explore the keyboard a bit closer. When it comes to Discord, the keyboard plays an important role when using the app. You can’t type without it of course, but did you know that your keyboard can replace your mouse when navigating servers and channels. In this section, I’ll cover some of the most useful keyboard shortcuts out there and a secret trick few people are aware of.
If you would like to learn more about keyboard shortcuts and see an in-depth list of them all you can visit this Discord article.
Hack #3 - I know a shortcut!
I’ll start this off by covering a few of the most useful keyboard shortcuts, some of which I only discovered recently. First, let’s look at how you access the “Keyboard Combos” pop-up which shows all the shortcuts in a convenient box for you to look over.
Pressing CTRL+/ will bring up the above shown screen which lists all the shortcuts for navigating and using Discord. As you can tell from the image, there are a lot of ways to use the keyboard, so I’ll be covering only the ones I found most useful.
Side Note: Pressing the arrow keys while in this pop-up screen has a fun little Easter Egg attached to it which gave me at least 30 minutes of musical entertainment.
The most useful shortcuts are the navigation ones, specifically the channel navigation shortcuts shown in the image above. There can be nothing more frustrating than having to move between a lot of text channels to read messages when you first turn on Discord for the day, especially in large servers that have a lot of channels. If you are someone who reads everything in a given server, you will find these combos cut down on time spent moving your mouse to each unread channel as you can simply just skip through them with a quick ALT+SHIFT+↓ and have more time for replying to anything important.
The next useful set of shortcuts is the chat navigation key combos to quickly scroll through the chat or skip to the oldest unread message in a channel. Combining the channel navigation with the chat navigation gives any user the edge when things are just moving at a pace no normal human can possibly keep up with, which gives you the power to be the first to read and respond in almost any situation!
The last set of shortcuts, and the ones I only learnt about recently, is related to voice chatting. For the longest time, I used custom-made keybindings to toggle mute or deafen when all I had to do was press CTRL+SHIFT+(M or D) to achieve the same outcome. If your surroundings are noisy like mine, these shortcuts will change your life as a quick smash of the buttons saves your fellow voice chatters from going deaf.
Through just these few examples, you can see why Keyboard Combos play an important role in using Discord as they can really up your game and make you the ultimate chatterer, but we aren’t stopping here as there is one last hack to share related to the keyboard that is possibly the most unknown Discord trick, so let’s get to it!
Hack #4 - Nobody saw that!
The final hack I would like to share is one I came across by accident a few years ago when my hand slipped on the keyboard and the message I had just sent went into edit mode. Suddenly, my world was changed as I had the power to instantly edit any message at lighting speed, or so it felt. I’ll start with a GIF demonstrating how quickly you can edit a message using this hack then explain how to do it.
Right after sending a message press the up arrow on your keyboard. This will trigger the built-in quick edit function of Discord which allows you to edit your last sent message. The only limitation is if that message is not rendered in the channel, you will need to scroll up until it is.
It’s as simple as that. It allows a person to quickly fix mistakes or change a message all-together without having to navigate any part of the UI with the mouse.
From all these examples, it’s clear that taking some time to memorize keyboard shortcuts can really change things up when traversing the wonderful world that is Discord and possibly give you the ability to become a powerhouse chatter in almost any situation.
Final Thoughts
My hope with this article was to give new users and veterans the tools needed to navigate the application in a way that saves time as it is a precious commodity. Through the power of the right-click menus and the knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, anyone would be able to master Discord. This allows us to spend more time on creating strong bonds with other users, and on building successful communities.
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