Thursday, February 7, 2008

Gmail Supporting Shift Key

Not sure since when Gmail is supporting the Shift key in certain situations, but I find it very useful. The following two examples work in the normal version of Gmail – not the basic HTML one, but the one with all features:

• Hold down the Shift key to select multiple messages at once. E.g. if you have 20 spam messages in a row in your inbox, checkbox-select only spam message 1 and 20 while holding down Shift... you’ll find all messages in-between selected as well.
• Hold down Shift while clicking on a message to open it in a new window.* This is especially useful if you want to reply something in your email which refers to another thread, requiring you to open multiple windows.

Note that you do not need to have Gmail shortcuts enabled for this to work.

*While this is a default browser feature for normal links, Shift-clicking message subjects didn’t properly work in Gmail before due to JavaScripted accessibility issues.

Update: Jason Adams in the comments says Shift-clicking was around since the early days of Gmail. Perhaps what I always tried before wasn’t shift-clicking but right-clicking the link to open in a new window using the context menu (which still doesn’t work here). [Thanks Jason!]

Update 2: Ex-Gmail designer Kevin Fox comments, “The shift-select feature for selecting ranges of checkboxes has been around since before Gmail launched publicly. The shift-to-open-in-new-window feature was added a couple years ago.” [Thanks Kevin!]

Gmail Supporting Shift Ke ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (17)

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