This is part of an ongoing series on Timesavers. The goal is simple: short, easily-digestible posts designed to help developers get faster and more productive
I’ve been a GMail user for quite some time, but only recently have I started using the GMail Keys feature. What a bonehead! Keys rock.
Why I love Keys
- Read every single email without clicking the mouse
- Easily "mark" emails read/unread/archived. For example, I get a lot of digest emails. I do skim most of them, but some days, I don't have time, so I'll mark em and archive em for later
- Perform common searches (all unread items in inbox) with just a few keys
- See the Keys Help with a single key combination (shift-Q)
Here's what that help looks like, by the way:
Frequently Used Keys
From a message list (like the Inbox)- c to compose
- x to select messages.
- j to go to next message. key to go to previous message
- y to archive
- enter to go into a message
- x to get back to your list
- if it’s a multi-message conversation, use n to go to the next message, and p to go to the previous message. hit enter to expand if it’s not expanded
You can also do searching really easily. Hit “/” to focus on the search box, then type some common phrases like “is:unread in:inbox” to show all unread messages in the inbox. In the video below, you’ll see more of that.
And finally, shift-? shows the help for Keys
See it in Action
This isn’t the greatest video, but I love the java posse and the content of this lightening talk is a solid intro to using GMail Keys. I give you… the Dick Wall’s introduction to Keys.
3 comments:
Word up! I having been loving the keys. I turned them on to get the MUTE functionality for mailing list items I was no longer interested in and it's been great with quick archive and delete functionality.
No doubt, keys rock in gmail, but you missed my favourite, most used key: [ archive + next message
Excellent! Thanks Bob.
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