Keyboard shortcuts to drastically increase your productivity
Tags: productivity, beginners, keyboard
Published: 2022-01-17 06:13:51

---
title: Keyboard shortcuts to drastically increase your productivity
published: true
description: Here's some useful and lesser-known keyboard shortcuts for a few apps and websites that you might regularly use as a web developer or designer.
tags: productivity, beginners, keyboard
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tqgrg47dl893pnydoud4.jpg
---

Over the last three years, I've been adding to and maintaining a keyboard shortcuts website called [Use The Keyboard](https://usethekeyboard.com). Over that time I've amassed some **5100 individual shortcuts** spread out across **85 apps, programs, and websites**. In this article, I'm going to break down a select few from a variety of programs and sites that I use on a regular basis as a web developer (and occasional designer).

## Notion

A popular workspace app, Notion has its share of helpful keyboard shortcuts. Whenever I'm using it, I find myself constantly using one of these to make navigating through my blocks a lot easier.

- **Ctrl + P** - Opens a quick-finder bar to search for any page in your workspace
- **Ctrl + Shift + Enter** - Opens an active block as a separate page
- **Ctrl + Shift + U** - Goes to the parent page of the page you're currently on

## Chrome DevTools

Chrome's DevTools window is open pretty much any time I'm working on a site. Despite it being a part of a larger software, it comes with its own set of shortcuts to make navigating through different panels and toggling features a bit easier.

- **Ctrl + Shift + M** - Toggles device mode, which emulates screens of different sizes for the current page
- **Ctrl + `** - Focuses on the console, and **Ctrl + L** clears the console when you're active in it
- **Ctrl + Shift + R** - Hard reloads the page, clearing the cache before-hand

## GitHub

GitHub has a _surprising_ amount of keyboard shortcuts on its website, and once you've mastered a few of them you'll wonder how you lived without them.

There's shortcuts for navigating through respositories:

- **G, then I** takes you to the Issues tab
- **G, then P** takes you to the pull requests tab
- **G, then C** takes you to the code tab

And browsing through the source code of an app, there's a bunch of single-letter shortcuts that you can press on any page to activate certain features:

- **T** will bring up a prompt to search for a file across the whole repo
- **W** lets you switch to a different branch
- **B** opens up the blame view

## Figma

Like most design programs, Figma relies heavily on the keyboard to improve speed and flow throughout the app. Here's a few lesser-known ones that I tend to reach for on a pretty regular basis.

- **Ctrl + Shift + A** selects the inverse of what you're currently selecting
- **Ctrl + Shift + V** while pasting text matches the style of what you copied
- **Ctrl + Alt + C** copies the _properties_ of what's currently selected

## Visual Studio Code

VSCode being a code editor (or even a full IDE depending on how you use it), definitely leans heavy on the keyboard. For this app alone I counted well over 100 individual shortcuts that you have available! I won't detail them all here, but I'll point out a few that I think are worth highlighting.

When it comes to searching for or replacing text, you have a few useful commands.

- **Alt + Enter** selects all occurances of a find match
- **Ctrl + K, then Ctrl + D** moves the last selection to the next find match

And when working on larger projects or more complicated codebases, I tend to reorganize my editor with one of these.

- **Ctrl + \\** splits the editor
- **Ctrl + K, then Ctrl + left/right** switches the focus to the previous, or next editor group

## Discord

Despite being a (relatively) simple and straightforward chat app, Discord comes with a decent amount of keyboard shortcuts that make using it just a little more exciting. Any chance I can get to not take my hands off my keyboard while working on something is a plus. Now, I'm pretty sure my most-used shortcuts for this revolve around navigating the app.

- **Shift + PageUp** jumps to the _oldest_ unread message
- **Alt + Up/Down** navigates between channels, while **Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down** navigates between servers
- **Ctrl + K** finds or starts a private message

## That's about it

Well, that's about all I can think of for now! If you have a keyboard shortcut that you'd like to see added to the site, feel free to open up a [pull request on the repo](https://github.com/aschmelyun/use-the-keyboard).

If you have any questions about web development, or would like to see more shorter-form content from me, follow me on Twitter [@aschmelyun](https://twitter.com/aschmelyun)!