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Gmail Supports the Shift Key

Feb. 8, 2008 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

So apparently this has been around for a while, though I admit I never knew about it. Yet another way in which Gmail is just excellent:

Not sure since when Gmail is supporting the Shift key in certain situations, but I find it very useful. The following two examples work in the normal version of Gmail – not the basic HTML one, but the one with all features:

  • Hold down the Shift key to select multiple messages at once. E.g. if you have 20 spam messages in a row in your inbox, checkbox-select only spam message 1 and 20 while holding down Shift... you’ll find all messages in-between selected as well.

  • Hold down Shift while clicking on a message to open it in a new window. This is especially useful if you want to reply something in your email which refers to another thread, requiring you to open multiple windows.
Good stuff.

 

Discuss this Article 4

daveinla
on Feb 8, 2008
Gmail is really improving at a rapid rate. I think it's clearly the must have web-app for now; or at least one that equals the application counterpart and adding the convenience of portability.
pmcgrath
on Feb 8, 2008
Paul, I know you’re a big fan of the cloud computing stuff, but really. This is a perfect example why it leaves me cold. The “shift click.” That’s only been around on the desktop gui for what, 2 decades. I’m sorry, I know you have your reasons, but I’m not ready to give up my full featured, rich desktop app for some watered down web app. Maybe someday, there has been a lot of progress, but not yet.
brandon.pope
on Feb 8, 2008
But the nice thing is that GMail supports IMAP, so you can use a rich desktop client to access the account like you would any other account, and then there is the rapidly improving web app for when you are away from your pc. Its there for convience.
pmcgrath
on Feb 8, 2008
Bandon, I absolutely concur. As an IS manager, I love the Outlook-Exchange pair. I can have multiple outlooks on different platforms all syncing with the same email database. And when I’m using someone else’s pc, there’s OWA. But exchange is not readily available to average consumer. I think it is great that gmail has opened up IMAP. It does seem to give us the best of both worlds. I wish this would become the standard for internet hosted email. Time will tell.

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