Geeks love keyboard shortcuts—they’re often faster than clicking everything with your mouse. We’ve previously covered Chrome and other browsers support many keyboard shortcuts, and Chrome lets you assign your own keyboard shortcuts to extensions you’ve installed.
A Google employee previously offered a “Shortcut Manager” extension that allowed you to set your own custom keyboard shortcuts for browser actions, but it’s been removed from the Chrome Web Store. It looks like Google removed this feature in Chrome 53.
RELATED: 47 Keyboard Shortcuts That Work in All Web Browsers
Google Chrome does, however, allow you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to the extensions you have installed. You can do this from your Chrome extensions page. Click the menu button and select More Tools > Extensions to open it.
Scroll down on the extensions page and click the “Keyboard Shortcuts” link at the bottom right corner of the page.
Click inside the box next to an extension and press a key combination to create your keyboard shortcut. Click the “x” button in the box if you don’t want any keyboard shortcut assigned to the action.
When you assign a keyboard shortcut to “Activate The Extension”, you can press the key combination in Chrome and Chrome will perform the same action that occurs when you click the extension’s icon on Chrome’s toolbar.
Some extensions offer additional actions beyond “Activate The Extension”. For example, the Google Play Music app allows you to set your media keys for actions like “Next Track”, “Play/Pause”, “Previous Track”, and “Stop Playback”. You can set custom keyboard shortcuts for the individual actions, and you can even select whether the keyboard shortcuts only work “In Chrome” or are “Global” and work no matter which application window is focused on your computer.
If you’re using the keyboard shortcut to activate an extension, you can even hide the extension’s icon (by right-clicking it and selecting “Hide in Chrome Menu”) to free up some room on Chrome’s toolbar.
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