If you are an Evernote’s web interface user and you are anything like me, you’ve probably felt the pain and frustration of not being able to move around with your keyboard when using the service. Now you can increase your productivity with this new Chrome Extension that adds shortcuts to most common functionality.

I’m a Linux user, and even though there are unofficial Evernote applications like Everpad, there is no official application, so I always end up using the web interface when I’m on my laptop. Which skyrockets my frustration levels, because the app is not keyboard friendly and I work all day with terminal applications that make extensive use of the keyboard to increase your efficiency. I do all my coding in vim, my email is managed via mutt, and weechat takes care of my IRC messaging, and even when I’m browsing the web I use vimium to have a good control of my browsing with the keyboard.

So you can imagine my frustration when I’m using Evernote web and I can’t do almost anything with the keyboard, and the things you can do are not always consistent. For example, when creating a new notebook you can press enter to accept the name you have entered, but when you get the same kind of dialog when deleting a notebook, the enter key does not confirm your action, and in both cases the Esc key doesn’t cancel the action.

Long story short, I decided to remove the source of my frustration creating a Chrome Extension that would get rid of most of my frustration by adding shortcuts to my most commonly used actions.

The most basic functionality is that Esc and Enter keys will work in all dialog windows:

Also all sidebar buttons have shortcuts as well as many other actions.

Here’s a nice overlay of some of the actions available on the search menu after a search has been done.

I realize that some of the keys may seem a little confusing in the picture, like the j and k keys that are used to go down and up respectively in the notes results, and the l key is used to edit the selected note, that’s why the best way to find out existing keys is with the help that’s toggled with the ? key.

The project has been working fine for me and I believe it is at a nice Alpha stage so I decided to upload it to the Chrome Extension Gallery in case anybody else finds it useful.

The project is hosted on github and issue tracking will be done in there as well.