How to Get The Old Slack UI Back

A bit over a month ago, Slack rolled out a new updated UI. Safe to say that this update is a mess. Things that were previously always visible and easy to find, such as your other Slack workspaces and combined channels/direct messages list are now hidden behind extraneous clicks. If I were a UX/UI designer at Slack, I would be embarrassed to mention where I work at this point.

Thankfully, there is a way to revert to the old UI, as discovered by the Reddit user u/guitwo. Their original instructions are for the browser client, but I much prefer the desktop client. Following these instructions, you should be able to get the old UI back on the Mac desktop client of Slack:

Enabling the developer menu

We first need to enable the developer menu in order to run a small piece of JavaScript code. Start by first closing your Slack client. After that, run the following command to enable the developer menu for the client:

export SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU=true

Because the Slack desktop client is just an Electron app, i.e., a web app pretending to be a real application, "the developer menu" is actually just Chrome's Developer Tools.

After running the command, reopen Slack by running the command:

open /Applications/Slack.app

2. Switching the configuration to use the old UI

Next, we need to run a small bit of JavaScript in Slack's developer menu. Use the hotkey Cmd ⌘ + Option ⎇ + I.

If nothing shows up, repeat the steps from before. Once you have the developer menu open, run the following commands:

// get the current local configuration object
const localConfig = localStorage.getItem('localConfig_v2')
// toggle off the is_unified_user_client_enabled
const updatedConfig = localConfig.replace(
  /\"is_unified_user_client_enabled\":true/g,
  '"is_unified_user_client_enabled":false',
)
// set the item to local storage
localStorage.setItem('localConfig_v2', updatedConfig)

Now close Slack one more time and reopen it. You should see the old Slack UI again!

There are certain caveats with this approach. One, the app will revert back to the new UI once you fully close the Slack app. Second, there are no guarantees how long this will work.