Control Alt Achieve: Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts in Chrome

This post is Day 11 of my "12 Days of Chrome-mas" where we are learning all about the Google Chrome browser including tips, tricks, lesser known features, and helpful ideas. You can access all of the posts in the series at: bit.ly/chromemas22

Although I use a Bluetooth mouse any chance I get, there are times when I am mouse-less. I might be on the go, or on a plane, or just somewhere that doesn't have enough room for that helpful input device.

In such situations I have learned to take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, and thankfully Google Chrome has a large amount of shortcuts we can use.

Some of these have proven to be so helpful, that even when I do have my mouse, I have found it easier to just use a quick key combination to get something done.

In this video we are going to look at some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome. I am sure there are several that I am going to miss, so please let me know what your favorite shortcuts are and how you use them.

Note: For my video and blog post I used my Windows computer. Anywhere that you see me mention using the Ctrl key, you can swap that out for the Command key if you are on a Mac.

▶️ Tutorial Video (6 minutes)

Watch on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn38bMaqzAU

🔗 Link Shortcuts

Usually when you click on a link, the new web page opens up in place of the page you are currently on. Sometimes though this is not what you want. For example you may have a page with lots and lots of links, and you want to investigate many of them.

By holding down the Ctrl key when you click on a link, it will open the link into a new tab in the background. You can go down the page Ctrl-clicking on as many links as you want and each one will open up in a new tab waiting for you to explore them.

🗂️ Tab Shortcuts

Speaking of lots of tabs, if you have a lot of tabs open, it can become a challenge to manage and navigate through them. There are a few helpful keyboard shortcuts in Chrome that can help with this.

Ctrl and Tab will allow you to jump to the next tab to the right of your current tab. Pressing these keys repeatedly is an easy way to cycle through a large set of open tabs to find the one you need.

Ctrl and the numbers 1 through 8 will let you jump directly to tab 1 through tab 8 in your current window.

If you press Ctrl and 9 this will let you jump to the rightmost tab in your current window, no matter how many tabs are open.

And if you accidentally close a tab, pressing Ctrl and Shift and T will reopen the most recently closed tab. If you press it multiple times it will continue to reopen tabs in the order they were closed.

👀 Zooming Shortcuts

Sometimes it can be difficult to see what is on the screen, whether for yourself or when you are displaying your screen for others to see. Chrome has some shortcuts to make it easy to zoom in and out on the browser.

Each time you press Ctrl and the plus key everything on the page will get get bigger.

Each time you press Ctrl and minus key everything on the page will get get smaller.

And pressing Ctrl and 0 will return everything on the page to default size.

🔎 Search Shortcuts

Sometimes a Google search will bring you to the perfect website, but unfortunately the web page is so long that you still can't find what you are looking for on the page.

The shortcut Ctrl and F opens the Find Bar so you can search the current page. You can then use the up and down arrows in the Find Bar to jump between each match that the search finds.

🧭 Navigation Shortcuts

Another challenge with a large web page is once you get to the bottom it can take a super long time to scroll back up to the top.

If you press the Home key, you will jump all the way back to the top of the page.

If you press the End key, you will jump all the way down to the bottom of the page.

📑 Bookmarks Shortcuts

I usually do not keep my bookmarks bar visible. Under normal conditions I find that it just takes up room that I could use for other things. However when I do need my bookmarks, it is nice to be able to quickly open or close the bar.

Pressing Ctrl and Shift and B will toggle between showing or hiding the bookmarks bar.

🖨️ Printing Shortcuts

Finally we can use the shortcut for printing to help us save a nice PDF version of a webpage. I like to use the Postlight Reader extension to clean up web pages so they are easier to read and do not have any distractions like ads. Unfortunately there is no easy way to save the cleaned up version of the page.

With the Ctrl and P shortcut you can open up the Print window where you can then choose the "Save as PDF" option to "print" the page to a nice clean PDF.

🏁 Conclusion

Again I am sure there are lots of other keyboard shortcuts that you use in Chrome. I would love to hear your suggestions for the shortcuts you use and how they help you and your students. Hopefully though you found these shortcuts to be useful.

And be sure to check out the rest of the blog posts and videos in my series on Google Chrome to pick up more tips and helpful ideas here bit.ly/chromemas22