Google is working on user-customized keyboard shortcuts for Chrome [UPDATED]

— UPDATE: December 7th, 2020 @ 2:30pm —

For power users and those who like to get lots of stuff done a bit more quickly than others, keyboard shortcuts exist. Between operating system shortcuts and app-specific ones, however, it can get pretty easy to get lost once we move past CTRL+X, CTRL+C, and CTRL+V (cut, copy and paste). I use a handful of shortcuts on a daily basis and I’d assume most users are in a similar boat: learn the shortcuts that help while ignoring the flood of others you may or may not need.

The problem with this approach is that there are usually shortcuts out there that would make my workflow faster, but the combo is either tough to remember or buried where I wouldn’t see it. Luckily, it seems Google is aware of this as well and is at work on letting users customize shortcuts for Chrome browsers across the board.

Digging into the commit a bit, I was a little let down. I initially thought this would be a feature that would allow Chrome OS users to swap out keyboard shortcuts for the entire OS. That’s not the case, but this is likely a more sweeping change for a much larger group of users. If you look at the list of Chrome browser shortcuts, the number of them is a bit staggering.

Though I’d love to see some further customization for Chrome OS’ dizzying array of keyboard shortcuts, giving the Chrome browser shortcut list a customization option will be a productivity boon for a much larger audience of users across Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. The new feature will work as you’d expect, allowing the user to map custom key combos to shortcuts they want to change up. At the moment, this is a work in progress, so don’t expect it to show up for a few versions of Chrome, perhaps in the first half of 2021. When it arrives, we’ll be taking it for a spin for sure.

UPDATE: It turns out I read this one wrong. After a bit more digging and some heads-up on Twitter, it looks like this commit is just a UI revamp for an existing keyboard shortcut page (chrome://extensions/shortcuts) that controls extensions allowed to create keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Great to see, sure, but not the overhaul in keyboard shortcuts I was hoping for.