Ever been the the first person on your team to introduce an emoticon to your office-mates? What a great experience that is. Everybody gets excited and praises your discovery. How progressive of you! How avant-garde! How hip!
If you haven’t had this experience, don’t fret. There are all sorts of hidden features that you can impress your team with. In this post, I’ll share some tips and tricks, and you’ll be showering in your coworkers’ admiration in no time.
- Auto-hide .gif files - Let’s face it. Animated gifs are one of the best things about the internet. And HipChat is great at sharing them. But when everybody is posting their favorite gif, your computer can slow down and then nobody is having fun. So we’ve added an option to auto-hide gifs. Simply go to HipChat’s preferences and check the box to auto-hide .gif files.
- Slash commands - We’ve blogged about these before, but we’ve added a couple more since the last time we wrote about them. Here are all of HipChat’s slash commands. Each of them takes the form “/<command> <argument>”
- /join <room name> - This will let you into any pre-existing room, but since HipChat rooms have fairly loose naming conventions (we allow things like spaces and non-alphanumeric characters), we generally suggest using the ctrl-t shortcut instead. Still, if you just can’t give up your IRC-style navigation, it can be helpful.
- /part - Leave the room you’re currently in.
- /available | /back | /here <msg> - Shortcut for setting your status to available (green bubble). The <msg> part is optional.
- /away <msg> – Set your status to away (yellow bubble). In appearance, this is the same as going idle, except it doesn’t automatically return your status to ‘available’ when you come back.
- /dnd <msg> - Set status to do not disturb (red bubble)
- /topic <msg> - Set the topic for the current room (just like if you hit ctrl-t or double clicked on the topic bar and typed something in)
- /code <msg> - Displays the message with code syntax highlighting (language is autodetected). Not yet available in all apps.
- /quote <msg> - Displays the message formatted with a monospace font, regardless of length or number of newlines in the message
- /me | /em <msg> - The “emote” command. This will let you display a line of grey text with your name at the beginning, similar to the style room join and leave messages. For example, if I typed “/me is happy.” it would show “Jeff Park is happy.” in the chat.
- s/…/… - Everyone makes mistakes, but it doesn’t mean that you have to let anyone know about them. HipChat comes with a substitution command that will fix any spelling mistakes that you make in your last sent message. But you’ll have to be quick. You only have one minute before you’ll no longer be able to correct your mistake.
- Web colors - For all of you designers out there, you can show hexadecimal colors right in HipChat. Simply type in #<color hex>, and HipChat will render the color into your chat!
- New emoticons - These pro tips are all about providing functionality to help you save time and work more efficiently. Because really, ain’t nobody got time for that. In that spirit, we are making
(timeforthat) a global emoticon! Heck, we’ll even throw in 
(grumpycat) as well! Who’ll be the first to show it to their team?
Hope you find these tips useful. These are only a handful of tricks that HipChat’s got up its sleeve. Let us know what your favorite tips/tricks in HipChat are in the comments below!
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