Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

Once you’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts in gmail, one of the first things you’ll see is the “>” symbol appear next to the list of messages in your inbox. You can press the “j” key to move down a message, and the “k” key to move up a message. When you get a message you want to read, press Enter.

Why J and K? If you’re an old crusty computer user like me, you may recognize these as shortcuts from an ancient Unix editor called “vi.” I happen to know the lead user interface designer of Gmail — Kevin Fox. I asked him yesterday about the reasoning behind using these keys. Kevin is not a vi user, and he picked J and K because they were easy to type keys situated next to each other that didn’t have any other use. Originally he had proposed it backwards, with J for next and K for previous, based on the reasoning that most of the time you want to read the next message, so that should be the first key. But all the old vi users at Google convinced him to reverse it. He grudgingly did so, but only if the team promised to change it if they got complaints. They never received any complaints, so the keys have stayed.