I’m always welcoming of a good keyboard shortcut as they can vitally improve the efficiency of anyone’s work flow. Having to not lift your hands from the keyboard and transition to the mouse is something everyone grows to appreciate as their computing experience expands, at least in this writer’s opinion.

Today is yet another keyboard shortcut that admittedly does not belong on the lofty pedestal loosely described above – but it’s still quite handy. It won’t necessarily improve your productivity but it should aid in your consuming of media, specifically that found on YouTube!

When watching a YouTube video it can grow annoying waiting for it to load so you can skip to the good or relevant parts. Naturally, you’ve got the progress bar across the bottom of the video which allows you to jump around the video with a clicking approach. Today I learned you can also use the keyboard to accomplish the same. Using the numbers across the top of your keyboard you can quickly skip around a playing video by 10% increments.

Pressing 5 will jump to the 50% mark.

Jumping to the beginning can be accomplish with 0.

The catch is the progress bar overlay must be present – such as when the video first begins to play and your mouse is hovering over the video; as you just clicked play. The keyboard approach gives me a finer control as I skip around a video over the traditional click with a mouse. You will find you can quickly scrub videos – helpful for any of the long instructional content on YouTube. The idea breaks down when videos are just a minute or so long, as you’d surmise.