20 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts to Maximize Productivity

There are over 80 keyboard shortcuts for Gmail. However, you don't need to know them all. In this post, we've compiled 20 most useful keyboard shortcuts for Gmail. With these shortcuts, you can save a lot of time, energy and increase productivity.

Some shortcuts require you to turn on the Gmail keyboard shortcuts. You can read this article to know how to enable it: How to enable Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts.

20 Most useful Gmail keyboard shortcuts

In the Inbox

j/k - Next/Previous Email

Press j/k to move up and down your inbox. This shortcut is useful for batch processing emails.

x - Select

Press x on your keyboard to select an email in the inbox and hit x again if you want to deselect it. You can use this shortcut with j/k to select multiple emails in your inbox.

y - Archive

After you hit x to select an email, use y to archive that conversation. This way, you can archive messages that are not important.

= Important

Press = to mark an email as important.

/ - Search

Press / if you want to move the cursor to the Search box.

z - Undo

Press z to undo your last action in the Inbox.

s - Star

Press s to mark an email as Star

When you compose an email

c - Compose

Press c if you want to quickly compose a message from the Inbox.

Ctrl+Enter - Send

Ctrl+k - Insert link

Ctrl+\ - Remove formatting

You can use this shortcut to change selected text into plain text. This shortcut helps remove the current format of text that you paste from multiple sources.

When you read an email

j/k - Move to the previous/next email

With this shortcut, you can move to another email without going back to the Inbox.

[ ] - Archive an email and move to the previous/next email

This moves to another email and archive the current one.

# to Delete

! - Move to spam

Shift+u - Mark an email as unread

If you want to respond to an email later, you can hold Shift and press u on your keyboard to mark current email as Unread and come back to it later.

r - Reply

a - Reply all

f - Forward

u - Jump back to the Inbox

Press u if you want to jump back to the Inbox from the Conversation View.