Become a Gmail Ninja With These Useful Shortcuts
Gmail's keyboard shortcuts are useful and can help you ease the burden of checking Gmail, but you need to know how to properly set them up. Certain shortcuts are tucked away in the settings screen, however, and need to be enabled to be used. Here is an excerpt from the Google support forum:
Before you can use these keyboard shortcuts, you’ll need to enable keyboard shortcuts in your settings:
- Click the gear symbol in the top right of the gmail window and select Settings.
- Find the "Keyboard shortcuts" section and select Keyboard shortcuts on.
- Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
If you, like most of us by now, are using the tabs feature, you know that Google has wisely used this auto-categorization to help us keep different types of messages separate to avoid clutter. Several of the tabs need to be enabled by clicking on the plus sign. When the setup is complete, you should see something like this:
Switching Between Tabs
The ` key is used to switch between tabs. This key is located in the top left of the U.S. keyboard layout and called the back tick. Please don't confuse this character with the regular ' symbol. This will move you along the tabs from left to right, switching tabs with each key press. To move from right to left, you'll need to press the ~ key, which is located in the same place as the back tick and is called the tilde, but holding down the SHIFT key. At first, it is not easy to get used to, but with time it will save you a few seconds each time you check your email. Over time, that can really add up!
Reading Messages
You can read the message by pressing ENTER or o (for open). To return to the list of messages, you need to press u. This key is not the easiest to remember since it isn't quite a mnemonic device, although I guess u could represent up to the index.
Deleting Messages
Another time consuming task is deleting messages. If you don't want to delete all of the messages on the screen, you'll need to select them one by one with the mouse. By using the up and down arrow keys, we can switch between messages, Then, with the x key we can select each message. You'll see an x in the check box as if you have clicked it. When all of the messages are selected for deletion, a click on the # symbol, which on the US keyboard is accessible by SHIFT 3.
You can find the complete list of shortcuts here:
I wish you the best of luck and I'd love to hear about any undocumented shortcuts.