J-walking with Reader

J-walking with Reader

via Official Google Reader Blog by Mihai Parparita on 2/7/08

Google Reader Keyboard (inspiration)

Google Reader is well-known for its keyboard shortcuts. When going through thousands of blog posts, news items, photos, etc. a day, it's important to do this as efficiently as possible. Many users find that using the keyboard is one way of accomplishing that goal.

The "j" key (which takes you to the next item) is perhaps the most well-known keyboard shortcut. However, there are many more keys to press, and I was curious to see just how much they were tapped in Google Reader. A quick analysis later, I came up with a simple top-10 list, and I thought it would be fun to share. The units here are "milli-Js", where 1,000 milli-Js are equivalent to all the presses "j" received.

Key	Description	Presses
j	next item	1,000.00 milli-Js
n	item scan down	324.18 milli-Js
k	previous item	139.49 milli-Js
m	mark as read/unread	43.91 milli-Js
t	tag item	37.48 milli-Js
p	item scan up	31.30 milli-Js
shift-n	next subscription	23.09 milli-Js
v	view original	17.98 milli-Js
o	expand/collapse item	16.81 milli-Js
s	star item	15.45 milli-Js

Of course, Reader has more than the 10 shortcuts listed above -- you can see them all in this list. Additionally, in some ways, the most important shortcut is not "j", but "?" (that is, shift-/). It shows you a cheat-sheet of all the other shortcuts.

Partly based on the data we gathered, and in our quest to make Reader as keyboard-accessible as possible, we've actually added a few more with the latest release. You can use "a" to open up the "Add subscription" form, "g" then "d" to go to the "Discover" page, and "g" then "f" to go your friends' shared items. If you have any other keyboard shortcuts you would like, feel free to mention them in our forums.