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Google seems to be finally adding support for custom keyboard shortcuts to Chromebooks. ChromeOS 111, which is currently available in beta, brings this much-needed functionality. Custom shortcuts still don’t work, though. The feature may be available with an upcoming stable version of ChromeOS.
Keyboard shortcuts have been one of the biggest pains of using Chromebooks. You have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts to get the best out of your ChromeOS-powered laptop. There have been hints at Google working to make shortcuts customizable so you can keep things consistent across platforms, but nothing has materialized so far. However, ChromeOS 111 contains enough evidence that we will have the feature sooner or later.
Spotted by About Chromebooks, the latest beta update for ChromeOS adds a way to customize keyboard shortcuts. Google currently doesn’t let you edit or delete the default shortcuts. But you can add an alternative shortcut for pretty much everything. The dialog box that lets you add custom shortcuts contains a “Restore defaults” button, suggesting that deleting the default will be an option later on. Perhaps the lock icon next to the default will let you unlock it before deleting it.
As said earlier, custom shortcuts still don’t work in Chromebooks. ChromeOS 111 beta lets you add alternatives to default shortcuts, but those alternatives don’t work. You have to use the default option. However, the promise is there. Google is surely working to make keyboard shortcuts customizable in Chromebooks. It should just be a matter of time now before this much-needed functionality is available to everyone.
Chromebooks may soon let you set custom keyboard shortcuts
Since this feature is still in development, it isn’t available by default in ChromeOS by default. According to the new report, you need to manually enable the following three flags to get customizable keyboard shortcuts in Chromebooks: chrome://flags#improved-keyboard-shortcuts, chrome://flags#enable-shortcut-customization-app, and chrome://flags#enable-shortcut-customization. ArsTechnica adds that you may need to enable a fourth flag too: chrome://flags#enable-only-show-new-shortcut-app.
Once you have enabled these flags, navigate to Settings > Device > Keyboard > View Keyboard Shortcuts. Here, you should see a list of keyboard shortcuts that can be customized as explained above. As things stand, the interface looks something like the screenshots below. However, Google may tweak it by the time it’s ready to release the feature. Hopefully, the company won’t take much longer to make custom keyboard shortcuts available for all Chromebook users. We will let you as soon as we have more information.
