Markdown is one of my favorite formatting languages. For the unfamiliar, Markdown basically lets you use text to specify how a document should be formatted. So instead of using your mouse to navigate your text editor, you can use text symbols to format your document.

Slack is one of my favorite collaboration tools, but it unfortunately does not support composing messages in Markdown. I’ve always wanted to be able to do this, so this weekend, I got around to writing a Pandoc plugin that converts Markdown to Slack formatting.

It’s available here on GitHub: omarish/pandoc-md-to-slack. Calling it a v1 would be a compliment, but it supports all the use cases I need. Feedback / forks are welcome.

How to Use It

$ pandoc -f gfm -t slack.lua file.md

Example

› cat example.md
# This is a first heading.

## This is a second heading.

This is a list:

1. Item 1.
2. Item 2.
3. Item 3.

_this text should be emphasized_

$ pandoc -f gfm -t slack.lua example.md

Result:

*This is a first heading.*

*This is a second heading.*

This is a list:

* Item 1.
* Item 2.
* Item 3.

_this text should be emphasized_