I have used Basecamp for years and yet the other day a coworker taught me something new about it. I was a bit surprised and also excited because the new feature was actually very useful. So to share that excitement I give you some cool Basecamp tricks.

Code formatting

When you have a snippet of code you’d like to share via Campfire or Ping you can have Basecamp format it for you using the following command:

/code <lang> | [paste]

where <lang> is some programming language.

For example, imagine I have this snippet of ruby code on my clipboard:

def sum_eq_n?(arr, n)
  return true if arr.empty? && n == 0
  arr.product(arr).reject { |a,b| a == b }.any? { |a,b| a + b == n }
end

Type /code ruby | then ⌘ + v to paste and ⏎ to send the message.

Basecamp will output the following nicely formatted code:

Playing Sounds

Dating all the way back to the original version of Campfire there has been a “hidden” ability to play various sound bites. These have been updated over the years and recently include sounds from Game of Thrones, Frozen, and more.

To play a sound just type /play <sound> where <sound> is one of the available sounds. For example, to play the 🎉 Tada sound type /play tada and enjoy!

Help

Both of these useful commands are hidden and remembering all the sounds can be a pain. To help with this they’ve included a help command.

Type /help and Basecamp will spit out documentation along with a list of all the available sounds: