Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Google Reader Hacks

Google Reader is one of my favorite feed aggregators. Its the first thing I check after checking my mail every morning, and every evening.Over time I've come to love its keyboard shortcuts which really make browsing feeds so much easier and less time consuming, so in this post I will share my top Google Reader hacks:

1. Feed Item browsing shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts J and K, can be used to browse feed items, while viewing a feed, you can tag it by pressing T, and by pressing V you can view the original item in a popup, S is for staring and shift-S for sharing. Another highly useful keyboard shortcut is U, with which you can view feed items in full screen mode.

2. Browsing Feed Subscriptions

This is my favorite part, you can use old school keyboard shortcuts like shift-p/n to move to the next or previous subscription, however, I have some favorite feeds which I always read first, hence manually traversing is a time-consuming operation. However Google Reader has something to offer here aswell: By pressing 'g followed by u' you can see all your subscriptions in a popup panel, this popup panel implements a incremental search feature, which is extremely time saving when looking for a specific feed.

The full list

After pressing W we get this:

I haven't covered all of Google Reader's shortcuts exhaustively, you can view them by pressing '?'.