Notion keyboard shortcuts for Mac

A large Notion workspace is a navigation problem long before it is a writing problem. ⌘P is the answer to most of it: it opens search and lists recently viewed pages, so moving across the workspace never involves the sidebar.

⌘K is the one chord that does two jobs. With text selected it turns that text into a link; with nothing selected it opens the same search Notion opens for ⌘P, which is why both appear against the same description in Notion's own list.

The two peek-view chords at the bottom are the ones nobody finds by accident. Opening a database row gives you a side panel, and from there ⌃⇧K and ⌃⇧J step to the previous and next row without closing it — which turns reviewing forty entries from forty round trips into one pass.

These act on whatever you have selected, and they are the same chords whether you are in a page, a database entry or a comment thread. ⌘E for inline code is the one worth building a habit around if you write anything technical in Notion.

⇧Return is the quiet one. Return ends the block and starts a new one; ⇧Return inserts a line break inside the block you are already in, which is how you get a two-line callout or a wrapped list item without splitting it in half.

Everything in Notion is a block, so the shortcuts that create blocks are the ones that actually replace the mouse. The ⌘⌥ number run converts the block your cursor is in to a different type without opening the slash menu at all — and because it converts rather than inserts, it doubles as the fix for a block type you picked by accident.

This is also the run that most often gets mis-transcribed. On Windows the same commands use Ctrl and Shift; on macOS they use ⌘ and ⌥. A list that tells you ⌘⇧1 makes a heading has been translated from the Windows column by someone who did not check.

Tab and ⇧Tab sit here rather than with the movement shortcuts because in Notion they do not move the cursor — they change the structure of the page, nesting a block under the one above it or pulling it back out.

The selection chords are worth reading as a group. Pressing esc selects the block you are inside; from there the arrow keys move between blocks, ⇧ with an arrow extends the selection, and Return drops you back into editing the text. Everything else in this table operates on whatever that selection ended up being.

⌘⇧ with an arrow key moves the selected blocks up and down the page, which is the fastest way to reorder a document without picking anything up with the pointer.

The Notion desktop app has its own small set of window commands, and they are the reason the desktop app is worth using over the browser if you keep several projects open. Tabs behave like a browser's, so ⌘T and ⌘click do roughly what your hands already expect.

These are also the only shortcuts on this page that genuinely do not work in a browser. Chrome and Safari claim ⌘T and ⌘N for their own tabs and windows long before the page underneath gets a look at them, which is why a shortcut a colleague swears by can appear broken on your machine for no reason other than where you opened Notion.

Notion also accepts a set of typed triggers, which are not strictly keyboard shortcuts but replace them. They fire the moment you type the trigger, so for creating a block from scratch they beat any chord — and unlike the chords, they read as ordinary typing on a recording, which is worth knowing if you are demonstrating Notion to someone.

The three trigger characters do different jobs. Markdown converts what you have just typed, @ pulls a person, page or date into the text, and [[ or + creates or links a page. Slash is the general-purpose one: it opens the whole block menu, and typing a few more letters filters it.

Notion shortcuts are unusually hard to teach, because the result is often subtle — a block changes type, a selection widens, a page opens. Watching a recording, someone sees the page reorganise itself and has no way to know whether that was ⌘⌥5, a slash command or a drag. Onboarding a team into a workspace runs into exactly this, over and over.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app that draws each press as a keycap on top of everything else on screen. It does not integrate with Notion, does not install anything into it, and does not record or edit video — it draws an overlay, and whatever is capturing your display captures that overlay with it. macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Mac App Store only.