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.