How to create a keyboard shortcut for Chrome pages
Chrome’s internal pages don’t all have keyboard shortcuts associated with them. You can open the Downloads page with the Ctrl+J keyboard shortcut, the History page with Ctrl+H, and that’s about it. There are other internal pages that you might need to access with a keyboard shortcut. You might be able to get an extension for the job but there’s an internal feature that you can use to open Chrome internal pages with a keyboard shortcut.
Keyboard shortcut for Chrome pages
Open Chrome and click the more options button at the top right. From the menu, select Settings. Scroll down to the Search Engines section, or select it from the left. Under Search Engines, you’ll find the ‘Manage search engines’ option there. Click it.
On the page that lists the various search engines, click the Add button. You’ll get the following box.
In the URL field, enter the address of the Chrome page. To get the address, visit the page in Chrome and copy the URL. That’s what goes there. Click Add.
The Chrome page now exists as a search engine. You now need to access it. To do that, click inside the URL bar and enter the letter or letters you set as the keyword for the page. Tap the Tab key, and then tap Enter. It will take you to the Chrome page.
This isn’t the same as, e.g., using Ctrl+E to access the Chrome extensions’ page but out of the box, and without an extension this is what works. With Chrome, you want to keep your extensions limited to what is absolutely necessary because they tend to drag down the browser’s performance. If you factor in the fact that Chrome already uses a lot of RAM, you won’t want to install extensions when you can avoid them.
That said, if you still want a simpler way to create keyboard shortcuts for Chrome page, you’re going to have to look for extensions to do the job and they’re going to have to be installed for almost all the pages you want to access. That’s going to add up which is why the above trick is better. If you find an extension that lets you create custom keyboard shortcuts for various URLs, then just the one will do the job.
