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Slack won’t open or you need to clear your slack.app settings.

Last week I found myself in a awful predicament.  Slack.app for Mac would not open and would hang when trying to load a Team.  I searched the Internet and then looked for the files that held the Slack Settings myself in all the usual places (~/Library/Preferences, ~/Library/Application Support, etc.).  After not having any luck I even at one point tried App Zapper to see if it could find the settings folder … No Luck!

After not finding anything I had somewhat decided that the only thing to do was to contact support.  Support didn’t help a lot and told me to go into the app and click Help -> Reset Local Cache.  This is a great tip for most things but there was one problem.  The app would not stay unfrozen long enough for me to click on Help -> Reset Local Cache.

I told the guy in support this was the case and didn’t hear back from him because of the long weekend.  I finally ended up just creating another user profile and fixing the issue that way (which sucked but I was due a format / reinstall anyway so I went ahead and did that while I was at it).

Tuesday support finally got back to me and had a solution that does in fact work. That file that I couldn’t find is in fact located in ~/Library/Containers.  So while this post doesn’t help me I thought maybe it might fix someone else’s problem(s) that wanted to reset their slack settings and could not.  Simple go to the ~/Library/Containers folder and delete the com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap folder.  This will reset your preferences and any Team Data you have in Slack.  Hope this helps someone else.

cpierce

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50 responses to “Slack won’t open or you need to clear your slack.app settings.”

  5. Slack was crashing as I’d open it, each time. Doing what you advised above fixed the crashing. Just had to sign back into Slack. As Arun said too – it helped remove abandoned teams which was a + as well! Thanks

    Reply

    • For some reason, I can’t leave a comment on the main article, and so I have to reply to a previous comment… :/

      Anyway, I had a similar problem, but I use Linux, so this only helped a little bit.
      Linux users need to remove the `~/.config/Slack` directory, and it should work again 🙂

      Reply

  6. This file does not exist in my ~/Library/Container folder, so this did not work for me.

    It seems though that it reads information from the following file: ~/Library/Application Support/Slack/4dd0c33d889442b5a4e61e8c6081e.dat

    Move this file to a temporary location (so Slack.app can not find it), and try to launch Slack.app will probably reset your settings. Hopefully, I have not tested!

    OSX 10.9, Slack.app version 1.1.10 (3117)

    Reply

  10. Another alternative, if you’re in Windows at least, is to go into your task manager, go to the “processes” tab, and close out every slack process.

    Reply

  15. This worked for me 🙂 Thank you for posting ?

    I kept getting “Application Not Responding” a couple of seconds after launching Slack.app and now Slack finally works again 🙂

    Reply

  18. OMG…I’m finally able to clear out an old team that I no longer have access to but the stupid icon of the old team would still be on my sidebar! THANK YOU!

    Reply

  19. Thanks! This worked for me. My team had a name change, and while I could correctly log into the web page, the desktop app kept redirecting me to the old team, where my login credentials did not work and I was stuck in this infinite loop of login, change team, bad credentials, wash, rinse; repeat. Was going nuts until I read your post. Sorry to hear that you found the fix too late, but your post served it’s purpose! Thank you!

    Reply

  22. Just to point out that I _moved_ the folder into my home directory, instead of deleting it (I’m paranoid), and Slack simply wouldn’t do anything but a blank screen. 😕 So then I renamed it as well, and all is well. Thank you for the tip. Slack support didn’t suggest it, even though I gave the symptoms meticulously.

    Reply

  24. In Ubuntu just do ‘rm ~/.config/Slack/SS’ to delete ‘SS’, which is a soft link to a temporary folder located in /tmp/.org.chromium.Chromium.z0fOJv/SS

    Reply

  25. Thanks for posting this. I found that this alone didn’t resolve my issue. So, I deleted the ~/Library/Application Support/Slack folder as well as the com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap folder inside of ~/Library/Containers. I then had to delete the app and re-download it from slack.com. I tried from the Mac app store, but it didn’t work.

    Reply

  26. Thanks! Helpful for me. I did a clean reinstall of my computer and your post helped me easily find where all the slack settings were stored, so I didn’t have to set up all my teams again. 🙂

    Reply

  39. Hello,

    I am cross-posting this in as many places as I can. Please feel free to delete it if you think it is inappropriate.

    On MacOS, I recently had an issue after a restart where Slack v3.3.8 would open but most of the menus didn’t work and no window ever opened. On occasion it would simply lock up.

    After working with Simon and the support team over at Slack we came up with a possible reason and a working solution. The reason is that it appears to be a GPU deadlock condition. The solution is:

    – Start Slack from the command line with “/Applications/Slack.app/Contents/MacOS/Slack –disable-gpu”

    – Go to Preferences > Advanced and in the ‘Other Options’ section check ‘Disable Hardware Acceleration’

    – Restart the app normally

    At this point the problem should be solved.

    Enjoy

    Reply

  40. Slack is not starting from the task bar icon. Remedy as follows. Double click Slack and see three bar on the left side corner. Click three bar and click file and click quit slack. Restart again slack the slack will come up.

    Reply

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