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Keyboard Shortcuts In Gmail: Time Saver

I've been using Gmail for 185 days now. And I stumbled into what I think is the biggest Gmail time saver yesterday—keyboard shortcuts.

It was disabled by default and you have to go to your settings page to enable it. But once enabled, you can navigate your mails, in two different views, with the keyboard.

The j key takes you to the next thread. The k key takes you to the previous thread. The Enter key takes you from the summary view to the detail view. The u key takes you back.

It's almost as good as the old rn news reader, by no other than Larry Wall.

(Just to show you how "web applications" takes the state of the art GUI development back for twenty years. (Sorry I couldn't resist the urge to take a cheap shot at "web applications." (And I think I understand what Bill Gates meant when he said "Have you ever heard of Windows?")))



Re: Keyboard Shortcuts In Gmail: Time Saver

There is an undocumented shortcut: as in Windows, Eclipse, etc., you can use alt + left arrow key to navigate from the detail view to the summary view.

Re: Keyboard Shortcuts In Gmail: Time Saver

Alt+Left Arrow is the keyboard accelerator for the browser's Go->Back menuitem for Firefox (and Mozilla? and IE?). So yes in theory it has the effect of going back to the summary view from the detail view if you have arrived at the detail view from the summary view. But my luck with the Go->Back action while using Gmail has been very limited. It doesn't seem to work.

Re: Keyboard Shortcuts In Gmail: Time Saver

Another pair of shortcut I frequently use is the x and y keys. x marks the entry (the conversation) and y trashes the marked entries. Wonderful for batch deletion of emails not worth reading.

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