Discord Chat Commands: The Complete Text Formatting Guide

Discord’s chat is built upon a Markdown-based text formatting system. While you can use any kind of markup to create text in your messages, this guide will walk you through the exact syntax Discord uses for all commands we’ll be covering.

You’ll also find keyboard shortcuts and examples of each command to make using these features as easy as possible. If you’re not familiar with Markdown, don’t worry—these are all relatively simple commands that require just a few characters added before and after a section of text.

Discord supports a number of different commands, and many of them are similar in format. Some commands only apply to specific message types or channels, so I’ve highlighted them accordingly.

Basic Styling

Bold (Ctrl+B / Cmd+B)

bold

Italic (Ctrl+I / Cmd+I)

*italic* or _italic_

Underline (Ctrl+U / Cmd+U)

__underline__

Strikethrough

~~strikethrough~~

Compound Text Styles

Bold italics

*text*

Underline bold

__text__

Underline italics

__*text*__

Underline bold italics

__*text*__

Spoiler Tag

||Your Text||

Empty Lines Within A Message

Shift+Enter

Code Block

Single line code block

`Your Text`

Multiple line code block

``` Your Text ```

Quote Single line quote > Your Text Multi-line block quote >>> Your Text

Formatting Categories

Discord’s Markdown includes several categories of formatting beyond basic text styling, including headers, subtext, masked links, and lists. These aren’t included in our coverage here because they tend to be more advanced, but if you’d like to learn more about how to format your messages, take a look at Discord’s Markdown guide.

Timestamp Formatting

Timestamp formatting commands allow you to add a time stamp to a message, usually used to denote when a message was created, edited, or posted. This can be very helpful if you want to share a timestamp with your community. However, there are many ways to do this within Discord.

The most commonly used format is the relative timestamp format, which denotes the time in terms of how long ago something happened, rather than an actual time and date.

t: short time (14:30) T: long time (14:30:00) d: short date (24/02/2024) D: long date (24 February 2024) f: short date/time F: long date/time (Saturday, 24 February 2024 14:30) R: relative time (“in 2 hours”, “3 days ago”)

The relative format is especially useful for announcements, where you need to specify a future time or how long until something happens. This way, your message will remain accurate regardless of what timezone your audience resides in.