Improve your Google-Fu

Preamble

Clarinspect is an online service. Because of this, when you use Clarinspect you will likely find yourself in Google Chrome with many tabs open, between the Clarinspect Hub, our YouTube channel, and the AssessmentNinja blog, and this can make navigating all those tabs a bit of a chore. To help combat this, Clarinspect has compiled a list of useful Chrome shortcuts to aid in your traversal of the digital landscape. (N.B: The keys need to be pressed in the order shown below.)

Basic navigation

In this section we will look at the hotkeys for quickly navigating around your tabs and pages.

Alt+Home: Opens your homepage in your current tab in your browser.

Alt+Tab: Toggle between applications running in windows. Yup, not Chrome, but very good to know.

Ctrl+Shift+T: This re-opens the last page you closed. Can be pressed multiple times to keep opening closed tabs.

Ctrl+Shift+Tab: Cycles to the left through your open tabs from the current tab.

Ctrl+Tab: cycles to the right through your open tabs from the current tab.

Ctrl+T: Opens a new tab.

Ctrl+N: Opens a new browser window.

Click and hold the mouse button down whilst dragging to pull the tabs into a new order, or into a new window.

If you have multiple tabs open, you can also click on the tab name and drag the tabs into a new order (drag it right and left). You can even drag the tab up or down to remove it from the browser window and start a new window - very neat if you want to keep a piece of work separate from the other tabs.

Alt+Right arrow: Forward a page. For example forward a month / week in calendar.

Alt+Left arrow: Back a page. For example back a month / week in calendar.

Ctrl+W: Closes the currently selected tab.

Ctrl+Shift+W: Closes the currently selected window.

The “find” bar

Useful tricks

In this section we will look at handy hotkeys that provide an array of useful shortcuts.
Ctrl+F: Opens the “find” bar. This allows you to search for specific text on a page.

Ctrl+P: Prints the current page.

Esc: Stops the page (or a download) from loading.

Ctrl+R: Refresh the current page.

Ctrl+K: Moves the cursor to the search bar so that you may perform a Google search.

Ctrl+J: Shows a list of downloaded content in a new window.

Ctrl+D: Bookmarks the page currently being viewed.

Ctrl+(+ or -): Allows zooming in and out of a page. Pressing “+” will zoom into the page, and pressing “-” will zoom out.

Ctrl+0: Resets the page zoom to default (100%)

Post-amble

While this is not a list of every Chrome shortcut, these are the most useful in day-to-day use. We would suggest practicing these keystrokes. By doing so their use will quickly become ‘muscle memory’.

Being both easy to remember, and perfect for speedy work, by implementing the use of these hotkeys you will have a much smoother Chrome experience.