Hit '?' to Get Started
First, like Gmail, Google Reader, or any good webapp these days with keyboard shortcuts, the only shortcut you ever really need to remember is '?' (the question mark). Hit it, and you'll see a list of nearly every keyboard shortcut at your disposal. (We actually noticed that a few important shortcuts—like Enter to view a tweet—are missing, so we've included all we found below.)
The Full List
Beyond that, if you're familiar with Gmail's keyboard shortcuts (which are based loosely on shortcuts in the popular-among-geeks text editor, Vi), the new Twitter shortcuts are happily similar, and they look like this:
Navigation
- j/k to move between the next and previous tweets
- Enter to drill down into or close a selected tweet
- space to page down
- Shift+space to page up
- / to jump to the search box
- . to refresh and jump back to the top
Actions for Individual Tweets
- f to favorite a tweet
- r to reply to a tweet
- t to retweet
- m to send a direct message
- n to compose a new tweet
- Escape to cancel a compose window, dismiss the help window
And that's all you need to know. There may be a few hidden gems we didn't find (the Enter, Shift+space, and Escape shortcuts I mentioned above were missing from the help menu), so if you find a handy one, be sure to share it in the comments.
Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.
