Facebook Messenger? Meta Messenger? Just Messenger? We don’t know what it’s supposed to be called these days. But we do know it just added a bunch of useful, Slack-like shortcuts that help you get things done faster.
You can use them to silently deliver messages without notifications, to find the perfect GIF, to send payments and more — all without having to fiddle around inside menus. And Meta says even more are coming later this year.
Messenger speeds things up with shortcuts
If you’ve ever used Slack, you’ll know that the simplest way to carry out certain tasks — such as creating a calendar event or scheduling a message to send later — is to simply type it into the chat using a shortcut.
Those shortcuts begin with a forward slash, followed by your command. For instance, “/gif sad cat” will show you GIFs of sad cats that you can use to convey how disappointed you are with your team’s poor performance.
And now you can use similar shortcuts in Messenger, too.
Messenger adds Slack-like commands
There are five shortcuts available in Messenger on Android and iOS — a couple of which are “coming soon.” Here’s the complete list and what they’re used for:
- /silent — silently delivers a message so that you don’t disturb others who may be asleep.
- /pay — lets you send money directly through a Messenger chat without fees. “Coming soon” to Messenger users in the U.S.
- /gif — quickly find the perfect GIF and send it in just a couple of taps.
- /shrug — sends the old school shrug (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) emoticon.
- /tableflip — sends the old school table flip ((╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) emoticon.
Many of these shortcuts should be followed by the rest of your command. For instance, /silent should precede whatever message you want to send,/pay should proceed the amount you want to send, and /gif should proceed a keyword for the GIF you want to find.
More shortcuts on the way
In addition to shortcuts, Messenger is adding the @everyone tag. You can use this to notify all participants in the conversation, which is great for sending event reminders, asking urgent questions, and more.
“These are just the first of many shortcuts you can use in Messenger, so stay tuned for more coming later this year,” Meta said.
