SheetKeys - The Hacker's Spreadsheet
SheetKeys is a browser extension which adds powerful keyboard shortcuts to Google Sheets, in the
spirit of the Vim text editor. It's written by one of the authors of
Vimium.
Watch the demo video here.
If you are a project manager, programmer, finance person, or just someone who uses spreadsheets a
lot, this can greatly increase your efficiency in Google Sheets.
(If you are using SheetKeys with Vimium, disable Vimium on Google
Sheets so its key mappings don't collide with SheetKeys. To do so, click on the Vimium icon in your
browser's toolbar, enter https?://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/* for the excluded sites Pattern,
and click Save.)
How to install
- Chrome:
Chrome web store
- Edge:
Edge Add-ons
- Firefox: Firefox Add-ons
To install from source, see
here.
Keyboard Mappings
SheetKeys adds many key mappings to Google Sheets. After installing, you can see and customize all
of them by typing ? while on a Google Sheets page.
Here is a partial list:
Movement
j Move cursor down
k Move cursor up
h Move cursor left
l Move cursor right
C-J Move rows down
C-K Move rows up
C-H Move columns left
C-L Move columns right
C-d Scroll half page down
C-u Scroll half page up
gg Scroll to the top of the sheet
G Scroll to the bottom of the sheet
Selection
v Begin selecting cells
V Begin selecting rows
A-v Begin selecting columns
Editing
i Edit cell
a Append to cell (edit but, starting at the end)
u Undo
C-r Redo
o Insert a row below the cursor and edit it
O Insert a row above the cursor and edit it
s Insert a row below the cursor
S Insert a row above the cursor
dd Delete the current row (or selected rows/columns)
x Delete cell contents
yy Copy the current row (or selected rows/columns)
yc Copy cells
p Paste
;ma Merge selected cells
;mh Merge selected cells horizontally
;mv Merge selected cells vertically
Formatting
;al Align left
;ac Align center
;ar Align right
;ww Wrap cell
;ww Overflow the cell
;wc Clip the cell
;fs Set font size to small
;fn Set font size to normal
;fl Set font size to large
;fr Freeze row
;fc Freeze column
Tabs
>> Move tab right
<< Move tab left
K Next tab
J Previous tab
Other
? Show the help dialog
;wf Toggle full screen
;o Open URL in cell in a new tab
Repeating commands
SheetKeys supports command repetition. For example, typing 5s will insert 5 rows into the sheet
rather than one. Due to the integration with Google Sheets, undoing a repeated command will undo it
one step at a time.
Other usability improvements to Google Sheets
- In Google Sheets, when editing a cell, typing ESC erases all of the changes you've made, and your
changes can't be brought back with "Undo". This can be infuriating when done accidentally.
SheetKeys fixes this. Now ESC will save your changes to the cell, and you can revert them if
needed by using Undo.
Ctrl-e on Mac OS X is a handy system-wide shortcut which moves the cursor to the end of the form
field you're currently editing. This essential shortcut doesn't work in Google Sheets. With
SheetKeys, it does.- Sheets has a useful full screen mode (View > Full screen) which allows many more rows of the
spreadsheet to be visible on screen. But it has two inconveniences: there is no keyboard shortcut
for toggling it, and there's a persistent popup whenever one enters full screen mode. SheetKeys
adds a shortcut for it, and auto-dismisses the popup for you.
Developer workflow
- You can use the
Extension Reloader
which provides a quick shortcut for reloading all of your locally-developed extensions. See
here for further info.
- Refresh your Google Sheets page after reloading the SheetKeys extension in Chrome.
- If you want to load this extension in Firefox from source, run
./make.js write-firefox-manifest
to get a Firefox-compatible manifest.json. Then navigate to about:debugging and add SheetKeys.
Release notes
See changelog.md.
License
Copyright (c) Phil Crosby. See MIT-LICENSE.txt for details.
