Everyone who has used computers for any period of time can tell you that learning about keyboard shortcuts for the programs you deal with day in and day out can be, if not a lifesaver, at least a timesaver. Gmail offers a wide range of keyboard shortcuts as part of the service. They can be enabled in the general settings menu if you’re looking for a way to squeeze a bit more speed out of your mail usage.
In particular Gmail users whose keyboards are superior to their pointing device will show a marked increase in speed when using these shortcuts. This is usually quite applicable to people using laptops with touchpads, as they are traditionally much slower than other pointing devices.
Instead of going through a whole list of every shortcut, this tutorial will cover the most important ones. Others are available via Gmail’s help system, and are thus easily accessed from the settings menu should you be interested after mastering these.
Note: You need to select the keyboard option from your Gmail setting page before the shortcuts would work.
c: Compose – This will put you right into a new email, ready to address it, slap a subject line in and type away. Shift+c will open the email to be composed in a new window.
r: Reply – Like composing, but it starts up a reply to the current message instead of creating a new one. Shift+r will open up a new window to reply in.
a: Reply all – Similar to the above, but the reply will be addressed to all recipients (except those in the BCC field) and also as above, Shift+a will do so in a new window.
f: Forward – Readies a message to be sent on to a new recipient. Shift+f will of course do so using a new window.
Those four shortcuts are vital to quickly dealing with the basics of sending mail and will speed up your use a good deal if you learn them. In order to navigate smoothly, there are a few others you should try to memorize.
/: Search – This will move your cursor into the search box. Very handy when you want to look something up quickly. Just type your query and hit enter.
k: Next Conversation – Moves the selection cursor (seen aside the email message of the left side) towards the next more recent conversation. Usingenter will then expand the conversation.
j: Previous Conversation – Slides the selector to the next oldest conversation. As before, the enter key will open the conversation.
When inside of the conversation view, you can move between individual messages.
n: Next Message – Moves the cursor to the next newest message. Hittingenter will expand or collapse the message.
p: Previous Message – Shifts the cursor to the next less recent message. Again, the enter key will expand and collapse the message.
u: Return to conversation list – Leaves the current conversation and returns to the conversation list. This shortcut does not necessarily return to the inbox, but rather to the list the message is in.
Finally, a few of the most useful tools for getting around between sections of your account. These are multi-key shortcuts, simply type them in order.
g i: Go to Inbox – Returns you to your inbox.
g l: Go to Label – This puts you in the search box, but fills in label: for you, allowing you to type the name of the label you wish to go to and hit enter.
g s: Go to Starred – Puts you into your list of starred conversations.
g t: Go to Sent Mail – Takes you to your sent mail list.
There are many more shortcuts, but try mastering these first since they’re likely to give you the biggest speed increase, being the most common operations people tend to carry out. If there are things you find that you personally do a lot of, make sure to check out the Gmail shortcut help page. You’ll pick up the things you need in no time.
