Chromebook Shortcuts: The Complete List for 2026

Chromebook shortcuts cover more ground than most people expect. Because ChromeOS is the operating system and not just the browser, a chunk of what counts as a chromebook shortcut (locking the screen, screenshotting, splitting windows) happens outside Chrome entirely. If you searched for chromebook hotkeys instead, you’re in the right place too; ChromeOS just calls them keyboard shortcuts.

This guide covers every shortcut on a Chromebook that Google actually documents: tabs and windows, screenshots, bookmarks and history, split screen, and the settings page where you can reassign any of them. It also covers what happens to your open tabs during a restart, a hard reset, or a Powerwash, and how to make sure none of them disappear along the way.

What’s the Quickest Way to Look Up Chromebook Shortcuts?

The fastest way is the table below, or Google’s full list of Chromebook keyboard shortcuts, which documents every officially supported combination in one place. That page is the one Google keeps current, so it’s worth bookmarking over any third-party list, including this one.

One thing worth sorting out first: are you after ChromeOS-level shortcuts, which work anywhere on the device, or Chrome browser shortcuts, which only work inside a tab? A Chromebook runs both, and most people searching for a chromebook shortcut list want both. If you specifically want the in-browser set, our Chrome Shortcuts guide breaks those down separately, including the ones that behave the same on Windows and Mac.

Most people only use eight or nine shortcuts on a Chromebook day to day: new tab, close tab, reopen tab, screenshot, lock screen, split screen, Task Manager, and history. Everything past that is worth knowing but rarely opened more than once a month. Start with the table, then skim the sections below for whatever you’re trying to do right now.

What Are the Basic Tab and Window Key Shortcuts on a Chromebook?

The core set is four shortcuts: opening a new tab, closing one, reopening one you closed, and switching between windows. Press Ctrl + T for a new tab, Ctrl + W to close the current one, and Ctrl + Shift + T to bring back the last tab you closed — hold it down and it keeps working back through your last several closed tabs. Alt + Tab switches between open windows, cycling each time you press it.

These four are identical to the Chrome shortcuts on Windows or Mac, which makes sense: Chrome is Chrome, whether it’s the whole operating system or just an app running on top of one. If you’ve used Chrome anywhere else, none of this needs relearning.

Where it gets more Chromebook-specific is what happens after you close something you didn’t mean to. Ctrl + Shift + T only remembers tabs from your current session — restart the device, and that history resets. For the edge cases, see our guides on reopening closed tabs in any browser and the Close Tabs Shortcut guide.

Alt + Tab handles windows, but not tab groups or the order tabs were in — if six tabs were arranged a particular way before a crash, this shortcut won’t rebuild that. That’s a browser limitation more than a Chromebook one; see the Chromebook Tabs guide for how tab groups behave specifically on ChromeOS.

How Do You Split the Screen or Snap Windows on a Chromebook?

Press Alt + [ to snap a window left or Alt + ] to snap it right, filling half the screen without dragging anything. It’s the fastest of the three ways ChromeOS offers to split your screen, and the one worth memorizing if you do it more than occasionally.

The other two are mouse-driven. Drag a window by its title bar to a screen edge until the edge highlights, then let go. It snaps to fill that half. Or hover over the Maximize button in a window’s top corner, which opens a small layout menu with split-screen options laid out visually.

Overview mode and virtual Desks are separate ChromeOS multitasking features, not split screen itself. Overview shows every open window at once, while Desks group whole sets of windows into separate desktop spaces. Both live on the same multitasking settings page as split screen, but they solve a different problem: more room to organize, not two windows side by side. For more on both, see our Chromebook split-screen guide, and for the in-browser version, Split Screen Chrome.

How Do You Take a Screenshot and Lock the Screen on a Chromebook?

Press Ctrl + Show windows key for a full screenshot, or Shift + Ctrl + Show windows key to capture just part of the screen. The Show windows key is the one with the rectangle-and-lines icon, usually where a function key row would sit on a regular keyboard.

Locking the screen uses a separate combo: Search + L, or Launcher + L on keyboards where that key has been renamed. Use it before stepping away from a shared table or a classroom — a closed lid puts some Chromebooks to sleep rather than locking them, which isn’t the same protection.

Both shortcuts work whether or not Chrome is even open, which is a pattern worth remembering across this whole guide: shortcuts on a Chromebook involving the Show windows key, the lock screen, or Task Manager work system-wide, while ones like Ctrl + T only make sense inside a browser tab. Screenshots come up constantly in troubleshooting, too — reporting a bug or saving something before a page changes. Pair one with Ctrl + H if you need to find the page again later, since a screenshot alone won’t save the URL.

What Are the Bookmark and History Shortcuts on a Chromebook?

Ctrl + D bookmarks the page you’re on, and Ctrl + H opens your full browsing history. Both are Chrome shortcuts rather than ChromeOS ones, so they behave exactly the same as they would on Chrome for Windows or Mac — nothing Chromebook-specific here, just worth grouping since people search for them together.

A few more round out the set. Ctrl + Shift + B shows or hides the bookmarks bar, Alt + Shift + B moves keyboard focus to it so you can navigate bookmarks without the trackpad, and Ctrl + Shift + O opens the full Bookmark Manager, where you can organize folders instead of just the bar.

Deleting history works the way you’d expect from Settings, and if you’re signed into Chrome with sync on, deleting it removes it from your Google Account and every other synced device too, not just the Chromebook in front of you. That’s worth knowing before clearing one search: it doesn’t stay local.

For anything past what a shortcut can do (finding a page from three weeks ago, or recovering history deleted by accident) see our guides on Chrome history and browsing history on a Chromebook. For bookmarks specifically, Chromebook bookmarks covers backing them up.

How Do You Fix a Frozen App or Tab With Keyboard Shortcuts?

Start with Ctrl + Shift + R to hard-refresh a frozen tab, or Shift + Esc to open Task Manager and close whatever’s stuck. Task Manager lists every tab and app with how much memory and CPU it’s using, so it doubles as a quick way to spot the actual culprit before you close anything.

If closing the one bad tab doesn’t help, Google’s troubleshooting order is worth following rather than skipping to a reset: turn the Chromebook off and back on first, since a plain restart erases nothing and solves more than people expect.

Only after a restart and Guest mode both fail does Google recommend a hard reset: hold Refresh and tap Power, then release Refresh once it starts booting. It calls this a last resort for a reason — rougher on the device than a normal restart, even though it doesn’t erase files the way a Powerwash does.

If freezing keeps happening rather than being a one-off, run Diagnostics (from the launcher or Settings) to rule out a memory or battery problem before assuming it’s software. For the deeper troubleshooting list beyond shortcuts, see why your Chromebook keeps freezing and Chrome Freeze fixes.

What Are Chromebook Flags and Ash Debug Shortcuts?

They’re undocumented developer combinations, not shortcuts Google publishes or supports for everyday use. People searching for chromebook flags ash debug shortcuts usually found a forum thread or old post referencing hidden key combos tied to ChromeOS’s internal window-management and testing tools — real, in that engineers use them, but not covered on an official Google help page.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Undocumented shortcuts can change or disappear between ChromeOS versions without warning, since Google has no obligation to keep them working the way it does for the published list. Building a habit around one is a good way to have it quietly stop working after your next automatic update, with nothing to search for that explains why.

If what you want is more control over shortcuts, not hidden ones, just different ones, the supported path is the shortcuts customization settings page covered next. It does everything a debug shortcut might promise, without the risk of it breaking silently.

The word “flags” in that search usually points to Chrome’s experimental settings, a different tool for a different kind of tinkering, not a place to find keyboard shortcuts, hidden or otherwise. If your goal is faster keyboard control of your Chromebook, everything else in this guide gets you there without either one.

How Do You Customize or Reassign Chromebook Shortcuts?

Chromebooks have a dedicated shortcuts settings page where you can view and reassign most keyboard shortcuts to whichever keys you’d rather use. It’s the supported answer to almost everything in the previous section — if a shortcut feels wrong for your hands, change it there instead of hunting for an unofficial workaround.

Worth doing once, early, rather than repeatedly working around a shortcut that never quite fits. Some people remap Task Manager or the screenshot combo simply because a previous laptop used different keys for similar functions, and fighting muscle memory forever is more friction than five minutes of reassigning.

Custom assignments live in your local ChromeOS settings, not your Google Account, which has one practical consequence: they don’t travel automatically to a new Chromebook, and they reset if you ever Powerwash the device. See the shortcut customization help page for the full settings walkthrough. That overlaps with a bigger question worth answering next: what a Powerwash does to everything else you’ve set up.

What Happens to Your Tabs During a Restart, Hard Reset, or Powerwash?

A restart or hard reset keeps your tabs if Chrome was set to reopen them; a Powerwash erases them along with everything else in your Downloads folder. The three resets aren’t interchangeable, and mixing them up is an easy way to lose more than you meant to. A restart reboots without erasing anything. A hard reset is rougher but still doesn’t touch your files. A Powerwash wipes local data back to factory state — Downloads, installed apps, local settings, all of it.

Google Account data isn’t stored on the device, so it survives a Powerwash regardless — bookmarks and history sync back once you sign in again, if sync was on. Open tabs aren’t account data in the same way, though, which is the gap that catches people off guard. Nothing about a Powerwash is designed to protect a session you were in the middle of.

BelayTab runs as a browser extension, saving sessions locally by default at no cost, and its rolling export writes a JSON backup to Downloads on whatever schedule you set — useful, but exactly the file a Powerwash deletes if you forget to move it first. Sync is the one setting that sidesteps the problem entirely, since it keeps a copy outside the device. See how BelayTab Sync works and how to set it up before you reset a Chromebook you don’t want to start over on.

Prefer not to touch Sync? The manual version works too: export your sessions and drag the file into Google Drive before you Powerwash, since Drive files survive the reset even though local Downloads don’t. Our auto-export and backups guide and exporting your sessions walk through both.

How Are Chromebook Shortcuts Different From Chrome Browser Shortcuts?

Chromebook shortcuts include everything Chrome offers plus a layer of ChromeOS-only ones that work outside the browser entirely. That’s why a single list can feel inconsistent if you don’t separate the two: half behaves identically to Chrome on Windows, and half only exists because a Chromebook is a whole operating system, not just an app running on top of one.

Knowing which bucket a shortcut falls into saves guesswork later. If one stops working, check whether it’s tied to Chrome (try it in a Chrome window on another computer) or to the Chromebook itself (it won’t exist anywhere else). That’s also why a straight Chrome shortcuts list and a Chromebook shortcuts list overlap but aren’t the same document — see our Chrome Shortcuts guide for the browser-only version if you split time between a Chromebook and a Windows or Mac machine.

None of these shortcuts, on either side of that split, protect what’s in your tabs: the pages themselves, the tab groups you built, the order everything was in. That’s a separate problem from remembering key combinations, and it’s worth solving with something other than muscle memory. Download BelayTab to save your sessions automatically, or read how saving tabs and restoring them works if a reset, a crash, or just a bad afternoon wipes out a window you needed.