The more I learn about GMail, the more I find it is a fairly ingenious email application, but there are several hidden gems in GMail that are not exactly undocumented, but are rather unknown to most. Foremore among them are keyboard shortcuts, which allow you to use your keyboard to register actions rather than mousing to a button each time.
I covered Part 1 of keyboard shortcuts, including the help, Compose and Archive shortcuts. Below are three more keyboard shortcuts that form the family of actions we most often take on pieces of e-mail:
R - Reply to a message. Again, there is no hint or menu that tips you off that simply pressing the R key will start a reply. Just try it while reading a message. Press R and presto! You have a reply started without your hands ever leaving the keyboard.
A - Reply to all. This one is just like the Reply command above, except of course your response goes to everyone in the original message rather than just the sender. Of course, this explains a mystery from Part 1 of keyboard shortcuts where the A key was not used for Archiving. The developers at Google likely figured Reply to all was a more often used command than Archive, and this reserved the letter A for Reply to all. (Remember A for Reply to all; E for Archive.)
F - Forward a message. Again, fairly straightforward. Press F and GMail automatically starts a Forward message so you can pass along your inbound message to someone else.
Now here is one more major trick that I really like, and it helps you bust out of GMail's limitation of sticking to one window: Add the Shift key to any of the above commands and your reply or forward will open in a new window, leaving your original message neatly in its own window. Play around with this feature and you will really look and feel like a pro. Having multiple GMail windows open lets you cut/copy and paste between messages much more easily.
In the screenshot to the right, I wanted to reply to my friend Rodney, and I used the Shift + R keyboard shortcut. Instead of starting my reply in the same window, addition of the Shift key opened a new window with my reply, and made it easy to cut and paste information into my Reply.
It's a pretty sweet trick, will make you look like a GMail black belt, and may just make your life easier too.
GMail is probably one of my favorite applications ever because it does so darn much, doesn't require anything on your home computer except a web browser, is very customizable, has some outstanding search capabilities, and is readily available anytime anywhere, such as on my mobile phone or someone else's computer.
Because I formerly used Outlook at work, I learned the keyboard shortcuts in Outlook to avoid the back-and-forth time wasting motion of moving my right hand off the keyboard to the mouse. A journey of just three inches does not seem like much until it is done repetitively for every single message.
Thankfully, GMail has some great keyboard shortcuts built which can save you some time. In my customary style, I will throw out a few at a time.
One CRITICAL prerequisite: The Keyboard Shortcuts must be turned On. They are On by default, but this could be a great thing to check, and it's easy to do. To verify:
- Click the small gear icon in the far upper right, then click Mail Settings. (You'll be going here a lot as you keep learning more about GMail.)
- On the General tab--which should appear by default--look for the Keyboard Shortcuts section a few lines down from the top.
- Make sure this section is tuned to Keyboard Shortcuts On.
- If it is already, just go back to your Inbox by clicking Inbox on the left.
- If not, change the radio button to Keyboard Shortcuts On, then scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click the Save Changes button.
The keyboard shortcuts that I think are most useful:
Ctrl + ? - Show a list of all the keyboard shortcuts. This is a great way to review the list of dozens of shortcuts and spot the ones you think will be used most often. Occasionally the list will trail off the bottom of your screen. If so, just click the link marked Open in a New Window to make them easier to read.
C - Compose a new message. What a huge timesaver! No need to navigate that mouse onto that Compose Mail button. This one seems a little counter-intuitive because there is no hint that a single keystroke on the C key will do anything. But try it; it works.
E - Archive the message. One of the most powerful features of GMail, archiving is available with one press of the E key. Why E instead of A? Well, I'm not a GMail developer so I can't say for sure, other than to report that A is reserved for something else, so stay tuned.
Hope this helps you speed along the Information Superhighway.
