Discord Text Formatting

Discord uses Markdown: add a few characters around your text. Discord’s “Markdown Text 101” help article lists *italics* or _italics_, **bold**, ***bold italics***, __underline__, ~~strikethrough~~, ||spoiler||, `inline code` and ```code blocks```. At the start of a line, #, ## and ### make big, medium and small headers, -# makes small grey subtext, > makes a quote, >>> quotes the rest of the message, and - or * makes a bullet list. [text](https://link) makes a masked link.

Discord has no official text colour option. The widely shared workaround is a code block marked ansi, with terminal colour codes inside: codes 30–37 set the text colour, 40–47 the background, 1 bold and 4 underline. This tool writes those codes for you. It is not described in Discord’s help articles, colours tend to show only in the desktop app and browser, and many phone apps show the text plain, so treat it as decoration rather than meaning.

A tag such as <t:1618953630:R> holds a Unix time in seconds and a style letter. Discord’s developer reference lists nine styles: t and T for short and medium time, d and D for short and long date, f (the default) and F for date with time, s and S for short date with time, and R for relative time such as “in 2 hours”. Each reader sees the moment converted to their own time zone and language, which makes them ideal for events across time zones.

Discord’s developer documentation gives message content a limit of 2,000 characters, and Discord’s Nitro page lists longer messages of up to 4,000 characters as a Nitro perk. Formatting symbols count toward the limit, and coloured ANSI text uses more because each colour change adds a hidden code. The counter here shows characters as Unicode code points, so Discord’s own count may differ slightly for some emoji.

The most common causes: a header, subtext, quote or list marker needs a space after it and must start the line, so “#Title” stays plain; markers must touch the text, so “** bold **” does not work; and nothing inside a code block is formatted, spoilers included. To show a symbol literally, put a backslash before it, as in \*not italic\*.

No. The formatting, preview, colour codes and timestamps are all produced by JavaScript in your browser, and nothing you type is uploaded or stored. The page keeps working offline once it has loaded. ZumaTools is not affiliated with Discord.