Use These Key-Commands To Whip Through Gmail

Experience the zen-like flow-state of almost never touching your trackpad

Hey, all you Gmail users?

I’m about to make your lives every so slightly more delightful.

Read on!

(Impatient? Just wanna see the key commands? Skip to the cheat sheet halfway down this piece.

But for those with time to kill, I have a few thoughts about typing and its cognitive fabric!)

Like most folks using Gmail, I spent years navigating around via the mouse or trackpad. To see the messages in my inbox, I’d click the inbox icon. To see stuff in the “sent” folder, I’d click send. To search for an email, I’d click on the search bar. I’d click “send” to send an email. You get the picture.

An awful lot of folks use Gmail this way, which makes sense: It’s a browser app, and most people navigate browser apps using the mouse.

Me, though? I’m a key-command nerd, to the core. I cut my teeth on computers in the 80s and early 90s, before graphical interfaces and mice existed. So everything I did involved a key command: Opening folders, saving and copying files, you name it.

Email, too! When I did my email, back in those days I logged directly into a…