As we gracefully enter the new year, hoping to never look back on 2020 again, I wanted to share with you my top five Chromebook keyboard shortcuts for fun and productivity. You can access your shortcut driver by pressing ctrl + alt + / or by opening your Explore and going to them on the ‘overview’ page. It can help increase your productivity tenfold if you connect some of it to memory.
There are quite a few available to you, but the ones I have chosen today are shortcuts that I use daily and sometimes moment by moment. The last one is just for fun, but we all need a little fun in our day, right? I hope you find it interesting. I’d love to hear in the comments section what shortcuts you use on your own Chromebook!
Quickly close an app or tab
Ctrl + w
Instead of dragging your mouse or finger to the top right of any app or website in the Chrome browser, using this shortcut (along with the next one) will feel so natural after a while that you can become an elitist shortcut user after that. If that happens, I’m sorry – it’s just so much faster! You can quickly close multiple programs and windows using ctrl + w.
Reopen a closed app or tab
Ctrl + Shift + t
If you close an app you did not intend for, you will normally need to go to your launcher and reopen it in the Recent section. If it’s a site you’re locked out of, you can ‘Reopen Closed Tab’, but this shortcut is much faster if you assume you’re connecting to it and practicing it. As far as I could tell, it gives you virtually unlimited ‘undo’, so press with your fingers on the home drive key ‘Ctrl’ with your pink finger, ‘Shift’ with your ring finger and ‘T’ ‘with your index finger. It becomes second nature after a while!
Lock your Chromebook quickly
Launcher + l
If you are at all used to keyboard shortcuts on a Windows computer, you may have heard that you can lock your machine with Ctrl and the Windows key. Now, when I started using Chromebooks, I missed it, so I dug in a bit. Instead of going to the bottom right of your Chromebook, clicking on the time clock and then clicking on the padlock icon to lock your device, you can simply press the launch key and the letter ‘L’. This will send you to the lock screen and require you to enter a password before entering it. I use it a few times a day because it’s a quick way to lock my Chromebook in a coffee shop so I can get up for a moment for more fuel.
Visually open your clipboard stack
Launcher + v
This one is relatively new. When you press the launch button and the letter ‘V’, the latest items are presented in your clipboard stack! This goes hand in hand with the new Holding Space feature that we are constantly shooting up and enables you to quickly drop images as well as text into a document or text field easily. After all these years we’ve had an invisible clipboard, it’s nice to see it without third party software.
Do a barrel roll!
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Rotate
Finally we have the famous Chrome OS Easter Egg from Super Nintendo! I included it because even though I do not use it often, I am constantly happy about it when I remember it. Pressing this button combination will rotate everything you have on your Chromebook’s screen (except a blank background without active windows) 180 degrees! It can be a little nasty when you do it repeatedly, but it’s fun nonetheless.
