Archive for the ‘HipTips’ Category

Chris Rivers

HipTip: Slash commands

By Chris Rivers | 1 year ago | 11 Comments |

Today, we bring you another HipTip that anyone coming from the world of IRC should enjoy. While keyboard shortcuts are great for most things, sometimes you need to add a little context to your commands. Enter slash commands.

All HipChat slash commands take 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-j 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)

If there are any other slash commands that you wish HipChat had, let us know. We know how hard it can be to switch from another system for internal communication and we’re always looking for ways to improve workflows for people coming from other chat products.

Chris Rivers

HipTip: Shortcut Keys

By Chris Rivers | 1 year ago | 0 Comments |

Keyboard CloseupSomething that I couldn’t live without in HipChat are shortcut keys. Unfortunately, we don’t really have any great way of informing users about them (at least not yet). Here are some of my favorites (btw anything using CTRL will also work using the command key on mac):

CTRL+W – Close the current tab. I’ve never been a fan of trying to mouse over little “X”s in tabs. It’s especially annoying if you want to close a bunch of tabs (maybe if you’re done for the day and want to close all your one-to-one chats). I also use CTRL+<tab number> in combination to quickly close tabs I don’t want open anymore.

CTRL+J – This one lets you join a room or one-to-one chat using a little auto-completing text field. If you find yourself going to the lobby and double clicking to start private chats often, this one might be quite a time saver. Just CTRL+J, type a couple letters, and chances are you’ll be good to go. If you just can’t get enough of the lobby though, you can use CTRL+1 to go to the lobby, start typing and your roster will filter in much the same way.

CTRL+F - Open the search box. Trying to look up something that was said yesterday in the room? A quick CTRL+F brings up search and you’re already focused to start typing.

CTRL+SHIFT+F - Upload a file. I have to say, I don’t use this one quite so much anymore now that HipChat supports pasting images directly, but it’s especially nice when you frequently upload files from the same place on your computer. Usually I’ll just hit CTRL+F and ↑ or ↓ a couple times and I’m ready to upload.

We’ve added a page that lists all of our current shortcuts here: http://www.hipchat.com/support/shortcut-keys. Let us know if you have any requests. We’ll be happy to try and get them in.

Pete Curley

HipTip: Inline preview for hexadecimal colors

By Pete Curley | 2 years ago | 0 Comments |

This is the first in a series of posts to showcase the super awesome (or lesser known) features of HipChat.

Tip #1 – When you paste a hex color (#7CA828) you’ll get an instant preview in the chat.

Hex color inline preview

Hex color inline preview

We had it working with 3 digit hex colors (#fff) but a color showed up if you typed in a flight number. It was weird. Have ideas of your own? Post them in our community-powered support center.