Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts — All 85, From the Official Docs

Almost every complaint that Gmail shortcuts "don't work" has the same cause: they are switched off by default. Go to Settings, open See all settings, and on the General tab set Keyboard shortcuts to on. Until you do that, only a handful of universal combinations respond and everything on this page below the formatting section does nothing. Google flags this at the top of five of its own seven shortcut tables, which tells you how often people hit it.

Once enabled, Gmail's shortcut design is different from most applications and worth understanding rather than memorising. Most of the important ones are bare single letters — c to compose, e to archive, r to reply — which work because Gmail knows when your cursor is in a text field and stands down. That is also why the same letter can behave differently depending on whether you are in the thread list or inside an open message.

The second pattern is the two-key sequence, which trips people up because it is not a chord. g then i goes to the inbox: you press and release g, then press i. You are not holding both. Every jump shortcut works this way, and so does the selection family — * then a selects all conversations, * then n deselects. Once the sequence idea clicks, the whole jumping and selection set becomes one thing to remember instead of twenty.

The formatting shortcuts are the exception to all of the above: they are ordinary Ctrl combinations, they only apply inside the compose window, and they work whether or not you have turned the shortcut setting on. They are also the least discoverable part of Gmail — the ability to change fonts, indent, and switch list types entirely from the keyboard is documented but almost never used.

Everything here comes from Google's official Gmail keyboard shortcuts article for the web client. Mac users should read Ctrl as Cmd in the formatting section; the single-letter and sequence shortcuts are identical on both platforms because they use no modifier at all. Note also that a few shortcuts overlap with browser-level shortcuts, and the browser usually wins.