Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts for Mac

This is where the time goes. Chrome's tab shortcuts are the most-used keyboard commands on most Macs, and the two people most often do not know are ⌘⇧T, which reopens closed tabs in the order you closed them, and ⌘9, which jumps to the last tab no matter how many are open.

⌘1 through ⌘8 are positional rather than by history, so they land on whatever is sitting in that slot right now. That makes them reliable only if your leftmost tabs are pinned. Note also that Chrome's own full-screen chord is Fn and F, which is separate from the green window button and from macOS full screen — pressing and holding Esc gets you back out either way.

These open the parts of Chrome that live outside a web page — bookmarks, history, downloads, settings and the developer tools. All of them open in a tab, so they behave like any other tab once they are there.

The last five rows are the focus and accessibility shortcuts most published lists omit. They are the ones that make Chrome navigable without a pointer at all.

Chrome's address bar is a command line that most people use as a text box. The two entries that change how it feels are ⌘L, which focuses it from anywhere without touching the mouse, and typing a search engine name followed by Tab, which searches that specific site instead of your default engine.

Google documents ⌃F5 as a second route to the address bar, which exists for screen reader and keyboard-only navigation rather than as an alternative to ⌘L. The last row is the one worth committing to memory if your address bar keeps suggesting a URL you no longer want: highlight the prediction with the down arrow, then ⇧Fn Delete removes it for good.

⌘⇧R is the one worth singling out here: it reloads while ignoring cached content, which is the difference between seeing your change and staring at yesterday's stylesheet. The last three rows are text-field editing shortcuts, and they work in any field on any page.

Everything that takes a page out of the browser and turns it into something else: a bookmark, a print job, a file on disk, an email, or the markup underneath.

⌘P and ⌘S are worth distinguishing, because the print dialog is also how you produce a PDF on macOS, while ⌘S saves the page's actual assets to disk. The last two rows are the developer entries: ⌘⌥U shows the source as the server sent it, and ⌘⌥J opens the console directly rather than going through the full Developer Tools panel.

Google documents these alongside the keyboard ones, and they are the half of the reference almost nobody reads. Several are modifier-plus-click combinations, which makes them a natural fit for the same muscle memory as the chords above.

The difference between ⌘ and ⌘⇧ on a link is the one to internalise: the first opens it quietly behind what you are reading, the second opens it and takes you there. Esc while dragging a tab is the undo nobody knows exists — it returns the tab to where it started instead of leaving you with a stray window.

Browser shortcuts are unusually hard to teach, because the result of pressing one is almost always a change to the browser itself. A tab appears, the address bar takes focus, a panel opens. To someone watching a recording or a shared screen, the browser simply reorganised itself for no visible reason, and every viewer following along on their own Mac quietly falls out of step.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each press as an on-screen keycap so the cause arrives at the same moment as the effect. It does not record video, has no browser extension and no integration with Chrome — it is a window drawn above your other windows, so any recorder or conferencing tool capturing that display picks it up.