Slack is now rolling out typing indicators in threads and they have already drastically improved my Slack experience.
Bee The edgewe use wires a lot. We’re constantly sharing interesting and potentially newsworthy things we find on the web, and we use threads to bring conversations about links or topics into one zone. At any given time, there can be a lot of people talking in one thread, especially with everything that’s going on right now. But because typing indicators used to show up in the main channel even when someone was typing in a thread, it can be hard to tell who is creating a witty one-liner for the thread or writing something new for the channel.
These new in-thread-type indicators conveniently solve that. The indicators appear directly below the message box in a thread, just as they would for messages typed into a channel’s primary feed. If you don’t have them in your Slack yet, you can see what they look like in this tweet from Johnny Rodgers, principal software engineer at Slack.
Typing indicators into threads should be available to everyone from Monday, Rodgers said. If you want to disable typing indicators altogether in Slack, you can do that in the preferences menu. In the ‘Messages and media’ section, uncheck the box next to ‘Show information about who is currently typing a message’.
I’ll keep the typing indicators on; they held me to a busy thread from this morning that started out as a conversation about Mountain Dew. Let’s say that’s not where it ended.
