As we move gracefully into the new year, hoping to never look back until 2020, I’d like to share with you my top five Chromebook keyboard shortcuts for fun and productivity. You can access your shortcut manager by pressing ctrl + alt + / or by opening your Explore and navigating to them on the ‘overview’ page. They can help you increase your productivity tenfold if you memorize some of them.
There are a lot of them available to you, but the ones I chose today are shortcuts that I use daily and sometimes every moment. The last one is just for fun, but we all need some fun on our day, right? I hope you find them interesting. I would love to hear in the comments section which shortcuts you use on your own Chromebook!
Close an app or tab quickly
Ctrl + w
Instead of dragging your mouse or finger to the top right side of any application or website in the Chrome browser, using this shortcut (in conjunction with the next one) will seem so natural after a while that you can become an elitist shortcut user afterwards . If that happens, I’m sorry – it’s much faster! You can close multiple applications and windows in quick succession using ctrl + w.
Reopen a closed app or tab
Ctrl + Shift + t
If you close an application unintentionally, you will usually have to go to your launcher and reopen it in the Recents section. If it’s a website you closed from, you could ‘Reopen closed tab’, but this shortcut is much faster – assuming you memorize it and practice it. As far as I could tell, it gives you unlimited ‘undo’, so to speak, so with your fingers on the keys of the start line, just press ‘Ctrl’ with the little finger, ‘Shift’ with the ring finger and ‘T’ with the index finger. After a while, it becomes second nature!
Lock your Chromebook quickly
Launcher + I
On a Windows computer, if you are used to keyboard shortcuts, you may have heard that you can lock the machine with Ctrl and the Windows key. Well, when I started using Chromebooks, I missed that, so I started researching a little bit. Instead of going to the bottom right corner of your Chromebook, clicking on the clock and then the lock icon to lock the device, you can simply press the launcher key and the letter ‘L’. This will take you to the lock screen and require you to enter a password before entering. I use this several times a day, as it’s a quick way to lock my Chromebook in a coffee shop so I can get up for a second for more fuel.
Visually open the clipboard stack
Launcher + v
This is relatively new. If you press the launcher button and the letter ‘V’, the most recent items will be displayed on your clipboard stack! This goes hand in hand with the new Holding Space feature that we continue to disclose and allows you to quickly place images and text in a document or text field. After all these years of having an invisible clipboard, it’s nice to be able to see it without third-party software.
Do a barrel roll!
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Rotate
Finally, we have the famous Easter egg from Chrome OS from Super Nintendo! I included this because, although I don’t use it often, I’m always happy when I remember to try it. When you press this combination of buttons, everything you have on the Chromebook screen (except a blank wallpaper with no active windows) will rotate 180 degrees! It can be a little nauseating if you do it repeatedly, but it’s fun nonetheless.
