Medium.com Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows)
How to add formatting to Medium articles with keyboard shortcuts
This article has been updated on November 9th, 2014
Some time ago I wanted to publish an article on Medium with code samples, but found nowhere how to insert one of these. After finding the answer in a Twitter post, I decided to have a closer look at the available keyboard shortcuts for Medium, of which some are not shown in the formatting bar.
I finally did find the Medium help page for keyboard shortcuts, although it seems only Apple Mac’s shortcuts were listed.
Anyway, here’s the list of keyboard shortcuts for Medium on Windows:
Ctrl + Alt + 0 = Starts a new paragraph
Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Turns a text block into / starts a new Heading 1 style
Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Turns a text block into / starts a new Heading 2 style
Ctrl + Alt + 5 = Turns a text block into / starts a new BlockQuote style
Ctrl + Alt + 6 = Turns a text block into / starts a new Code style
Ctrl + Alt + 3 = Turns a text block into / starts a new Heading 3 style
Ctrl + b = Turns selected text into bold style
Ctrl + k = Adds a new link
Ctrl + i = Turns selected text into italic style
Ctrl + e = Centers text. This shortcut presumably replaces the now removed Pullquote shortcut, minus the font size (Ctrl + 7, no longer working)
One last interesting shortcut:
Ctrl + : = brings up the shortcut menu with most of the keyboard shortcuts (not all).
Previously (read 2013), the ‘Alt’ was omitted from the first six keyboard shortcut combinations, but as Google Chrome assigned the Ctrl + <number> shortcuts for navigating between browser tabs, Medium’s Ctrl + <number> shortcuts could no longer be used.
Third-Party Embeddings
Third-party embeddings are possible for a nice set of websites at the time of writing (Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Vines, Kickstarter, SoundCloud, Instagram, Rd.io, Github gists). You can view an example of these in this article. Adressing developer concerns, Medium has added support for Github gists, and though this is a step forward, unfortunately gists do not allow the same interactivity as code snippets from sites like jsfiddle.net, codepen.io, jsbin.com and other similar Javascript snippet websites.
Given that Medium uses Embed.ly, I’ve decided it might be worth a test to try out some of the not-officially-supported embeds anyway, so here goes:
Codepen.io embed
Jsbin.com embed
Jsfiddle.net embed
As you can see, the embedding service detects the website, but does not correctly generate an embed. What about static code, such as pastebin?
At least it does show the correct title…
For further reading on Medium features, check out the following article:
- Why Medium is awesome and why it pisses me off, Brad Chin
