For as long as I’ve been a slack user I’ve long been annoyed by colleagues pasting me curl statements or SQL statements that contain smart quotes. While a curl will just fail, smart quotes in the wrong DB client can be extremely dangerous when it comes to SQL Of course formatting as code in Slack gets around this, but let’s be honest, do any of us on engineering teams want/need smart quotes? If you answer is no I have a solution for you!

Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard > Text
Once you navigate there uncheck the box on the right for “User Smart Quotes and Dashes”.

Once you’ve done this. you’ll need to restart Slack for it to take effect but you will no longer get smart quotes! Enjoy!