# 5 Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts to boost your productivity

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.

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Tab</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>⌥</kbd> + <kbd>→</kbd> (for macOS) lets you move to the next tab.

Edit: <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Tab</kbd> works on macOS too, kudos to @[Dhruva Srinivas](@carrotfarmer) for pointing it out

Bonus:
We can also move to the previous tab with <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>Tab</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>⌥</kbd> + <kbd>←</kbd> (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 - 

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>t</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>t</kbd> (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.

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>a</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>a</kbd> (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.

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>w</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>w</kbd> (for macOS) closes the current tab.

Bonus: <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>w</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>w</kbd> (for macOS) closes the current window.

## Open a new tab or a window
<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>t</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>t</kbd> (for macOS) opens a new tab and jumps to it.

Similarly, <kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>n</kbd> (for Windows) and <kbd>⌘</kbd> + <kbd>n</kbd> (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](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 🤞