In this article, we’ll show you how to bold Discord text chats.
How it works
The key to this method of adding color to text is that Discord uses Javascript to build their interfaces along with a theme known as Solarized Dark and a library called highlight.js.
That is, when you are logged into your Discord server, the page you see is rendered using a number of fairly complex Javascript programs, including highlight.js.
While Discord’s native UI does not support colorizing text, the underlying Javascript engine running the highlight.js script does. By inserting code snippets into the text chat, you can change the color of the words displayed in the text chat window for everyone.
The basic concept to understand is that in order to change the color of a given piece of text, you need to encapsulate that text in a block of code. This is a three-line block of text with your text as the middle block.
Using the backtick character
To color any text in Discord, you need to use the backtick character located in the upper left corner of your keyboard. It accompanies the tilde character:
Write the first line of code
The first line of a code block must be three backticks (“”) followed by a passphrase that tells the Solarized Dark theme which color to display. It should look like this:
Note: “CSS” may change to something like “Tex” or another phrase depending on the desired result. We will cover this below.
Enter the second line
The second line should contain your text, typed as usual. Hold Shift + Enter to create a new line. Just pressing the Enter button will send the message, so you have to hold down the Shift key.
Enter the third line
The third line of the code block must contain three more backticks: (“`). This rarely changes, regardless of the expected result, and should look like this:
Since we used ““ CSS, your text should look like this:
Entering text
There are two main ways to enter text this way. The first way is to have on your computer a text file with different codes for different text colors that you can access this way and cut and paste the segments you want to use.
Another way is to directly inject a block of code into the Discord chat engine line by line. Type one line, then press Shift-Enter to create another line without posting to Discord. Enter the second line and press Shift-Enter again. Then type in the third line and hit Enter and the whole block will be sent at once and display your text.
This method has some limitations. First, you must do this for every line of text you want to color in – you can’t just turn color on or off. Second, your text will appear in a field on the Discord server.
Your color options
The highlight.js codes provide access to seven new colors in addition to the default gray. Once you get the hang of them, markdown codes make a lot of sense, don’t be afraid to experiment and try to find new ones.
