Skip to main content

Command Palette

Search for a command to run...

5 Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts to boost your productivity

Published
3 min read
5 Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts to boost your productivity
A

I am a high school student, small YouTuber and a developer and recently a blogger too!!!

Browsers have become an integral part of our life and most applications are web-based now. We use web browsers for everything, from asking a question on Stackoverflow to booking a flight ticket. We often end up having a huge number of tabs open and it becomes quite hard to keep a track of them. It gets especially confusing when we try to switch between tabs. Let us look at 5 keyboard shortcuts that can boost our productivity -

Note: Although I am going to be talking about keyboard shortcuts specific to Chrome, they should remain the same across all Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, etc.)

Moving between tabs

Clicking tabs can be quite a painful and slow process, especially, if you switch between them frequently. Keyboard shortcuts greatly speed things up here.

Ctrl + Tab (for Windows) and + + (for macOS) lets you move to the next tab.

Edit: Ctrl + Tab works on macOS too, kudos to Dhruva Srinivas for pointing it out

Bonus: We can also move to the previous tab with Ctrl + Shift + Tab (for Windows) and + + (for macOS)

Re-opening closed tabs

We tend to close tabs by mistake but there is a simple keyboard shortcut that can re-open the last closed tab -

Ctrl + Shift + t (for Windows) and + Shift + t (for macOS) lets you re-open recently closed tabs in the order they were closed in.

Bonus: If you close a whole window, the above keyboard shortcut will re-open the whole window with all the tabs.

Searching through open tabs

As the number of tabs open gets larger and larger, it gets difficult to find a tab. Fortunately, from Chrome 87 onwards, we can search through all open tabs, as well as recently closed tabs.

Ctrl + Shift + a (for Windows) and + Shift + a (for macOS) opens the tab search dialog.

Close the current tab

After we are done with using a web page on a tab, it is a good idea to close it so that it doesn't clutter our tab bar and keeps the resource usage low.

Ctrl + w (for Windows) and + w (for macOS) closes the current tab.

Bonus: Ctrl + Shift + w (for Windows) and + Shift + w (for macOS) closes the current window.

Open a new tab or a window

Ctrl + t (for Windows) and + t (for macOS) opens a new tab and jumps to it.

Similarly, Ctrl + n (for Windows) and + n (for macOS) opens a new window and jumps to it.

All Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts - https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/157179?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

Conclusion

I hope you have found this small article helpful and now you can be more productive while browsing the web. See you in the next one 🤞

D

On Windows , Ctrl + Number n (1 to 9) to jump to nth Tab.

1
A
Anish De4y ago

Yep, that is a great one too.

Small correction: it is Ctrl + (1 to 8). Ctrl + 9 jumpts to the last tab.

Also, just to add up, on mac, it is ⌘ + (1 to 8) to jump to the nth tab nd ⌘ + 9 to jump to the last tab

S

Very helpful article! Even though some of these hacks are known to me but I rarely use them.

1
M

This one is handy and definitely an acquired taste 😋

To jump to the Search bar/Omni bar with url selected :

On Mac OS : CMD + L

gif.gif

3
A
Anish De4y ago

Wow, that seems to be quite handy!

Also, for Windows and Linux folks, it is Ctrl + L.

Thanks for sharing!

2
S

Very cool. Keep sharing such tips.

4
A
Anish De4y ago

Sure!

D

Hey, nice article! I'd like to mention that ctrl+tab works on Mac too

A
Anish De4y ago

Interesting, I will make the correction (I had checked the mac shortcuts from the official list)

1

More from this blog

A

AnishDe12020 - Articles on Development and Tech

33 posts

16 • 🌐 Fullstack Web Developer • 📝 Blogger • 🚀 Web3 Enthusiast • 📱 Tech Enthusiast