How to Make Discord Look and Feel Like Slack
Slack made recently made a few changes to its free plan, limiting message archives to the last 90 days instead of the previous limit of 10,000 messages. There are ways around this limitation, but I suspect more than a few communities will be moving to Discord instead.
If you’re part of this migration, you might find that Discord looks and feels a little… odd compared to what you’re used to. Here’s how you can make things a little easier for yourself.
Switch to light mode
Let’s start with the most obvious difference: Discord is dark by default, even if your computer or phone isn’t set to dark mode.
This may sound familiar if you’ve used Slack in dark mode, admittedly, but it looks alien to people in light mode. You can change Discord to work in Light mode by clicking the gear next to your name in the bottom left corner that opens user settings. Go to Looks and you will find the option to enable the light Theme. Alternatively, if you’re the kind of person who regularly switches between dark and light modes, you can use the Sync with computer Option to keep Discord in line with everything else.
Discord over Justin Pot
Add a little contrast
Discord’s light mode makes everything bright, including the left sidebar. This makes it easy for Slack users to get lost – there is no difference between the channel list and the rest of the interface. That’s why I recommend checking Dark sidebar. Enabling this keeps the left panel dark in light mode, meaning it visually stands out. That goes far.
Discord over Justin Pot
Change the fonts and colors (a little)
A little below the theme options is the font scaling. You can bring the fonts closest to Slack’s default by changing the Chat font scaling level to 16px and the Distance between message groups to 4pxor just tweak things until they look right for you.
Finally, if you’re not a fan of some people’s usernames being different colors, go to Accessibility Section. Usernames on Discord servers are colored according to their role (usually granted by admins to organize people into groups based on their interests, moderator or admin roles, or some other special status) on the server. If you want every username to look the same, check this out Do not show role colors– Now everyone has the same color, just like in Slack. (If you don’t want to lose that context, you can alternatively select Show role colors next to names and a colored circle appears next to their names.)
Finally, you can generally lower the colors by adjusting the saturation. This will mute the different shades of blue in the UI as well as the reel colors.
Add that custom emoji you love so much to Slack
Each Slack ends up taking a seemingly infinite number of custom emojis. So if you’ve recently migrated to Discord, chances are you’ll miss them. The good news is that you can take some with you; The bad news is not all. Each server can offer up to 50 emojis. Each server can also offer up to 50 animated emojis, although only paying Discord Nitro customers can use these.
However, let’s find and add your favorite emoji. Chances are they can be found at Slackmojis and its nearly identical sister site Discordmojis, so search there and download the ones you want. Now in Discord, click on the current server name in the top left corner and click server settings. Go to emoticons and you can upload up to 50 custom emojis. If the emoji option isn’t there, it’s because you don’t have permission to upload emotes to the server, which you can probably grant from an admin. Anyone on your server can use the emoji you add.
Discord is not, and never will be, the same as Slack. That doesn’t mean you can’t make it a little more familiar. These tweaks bring you closer together.