Keyboard shortcuts for the article editor

The shortcuts the article editor supports, and the one that prevents most of the formatting problems people spend afternoons fixing afterwards.

The shortcuts the article editor supports. One of them prevents most of the formatting problems people spend afternoons fixing.

Paste as plain text is the one to learn

Nearly every strange-looking article traces back to a paste from a document or a website that brought its own fonts, colours and spacing with it. Ctrl+Shift+V avoids the problem instead of fixing it afterwards, and it is faster than clearing the formatting once it is in.

Headings come from the menu, not from bold

Set a heading from the heading selector in the toolbar rather than by making text big and bold. Headings are structure, and structure is what search, the table of contents and screen readers use. Large bold text is none of those things, and no shortcut turns it into one.

Two that are not on the list

Zendesk documents the shortcuts above and no others. In particular there is no documented shortcut for inserting a link or for saving, so use the toolbar and the save control rather than trusting a key combination that may belong to your browser instead of the editor.

That matters most for saving: the editor is a web page in a browser tab, and tabs close and sessions expire. Save deliberately, from the editor, rather than assuming a keystroke did it.

See also

• The article editor toolbar
• Using the source code editor
• Viewing and restoring article revisions