Wagtail Keyboard Shortcuts

Hey y'all! Did you know that you can use some of your favorite keyboard shortcuts in Wagtail? Yeah, yeah you can! I'm about to change your life. So let's go over here on the sidebar. And if you click on the help menu here, you should see an item called shortcuts And this will open up a full list of keyboard trickets that you can use to navigate Wagtail and to do different things to your text. And so you'll notice that a lot of the actions are very similar to what you find in other text editing programs. I'm on a Mac, so everything here has a command key. If you're on Windows, it'll probably be control or something similar. But you'll notice that pretty much like copy, cut, paste, things like that, and also down here under the text formatting, all these commands are pretty much the same ones that you would find in most other text editing programs

I will note that you might need a little extra configuration to use things like strike through, superscript, and subscript. So if those don't work for you right away, don't fear, you might just need to add some extra settings. But the ones that I think that are the most useful and that I want to draw your attention to are these three here in the middle Because they are specific to Wagtail and they can be very useful to you as you're writing and editing So let's go over to a blog post I published recently for Earth Day. It's on hot takes and climate change, and I'll include a link. If you want to read it, I think you'll learn a lot about digital content. uh and global warming. Anyway, I'm gonna scroll down here

to update the CTA. Let's say I wanted to uh you know make a change and reuse the content. I'm gonna open the preview window, but rather than going all the way over and clicking the preview button, I'm gonna use Command P to toggle the window instead. Yeah, there's my preview right there. And I can, you know, I can switch it on, switch it off all day long if I wanted to Uh you know, with my hands not having to leave the keyboard. I do need to uh use a bit of scroll here to get all the way down to see the CTA I'm changing. But yeah, here it is. And so I'm gonna go ahead and update the text and instead of ready to learn, I'm gonna shorten this to uh

curious. Uh and I highlighted the wrong piece, so let's go ahead and do that instead. Uh, curious about Wagtail. Nice and short. So rather than saving my draft by going all the way down to the bottom and hitting that big old green save draft button, I'm going to use Command S instead. And hands don't have to leave the keyboard except when you're making gesticulations for videos. And so that makes things a whole lot easier. Uh, you know, when you're writing and stuff like that and you just like get in the habit of saving, uh, you know, it makes it easier to prevent uh losing some keywriting in your wagtail. Although we do have some news about autosave that I will blab about in just a second.

One last thing I wanted to show you is the shortcut for adding a link. So I realized when I published this blog post that I forgot to include a link to our friends at the Green Web Foundation. So let me find that paragraph right here. here where I want to add that. Yes, here. So I'm just gonna go ahead and highlight that. And I'm gonna go to their website and I'm gonna grab their URL. And back here I'm gonna hit Command K and that opens up the link menu. And so I can just go ahead and add the link right there after hitting Command K. And there we go. We have a brand new link. If I wanted to update that link, uh, you know, remove it or something like that, I can

you know, highlight it again and then I can hit uh Command K and you know if I wanted to change it to like their new section or something like that I could go ahead and make a change. So those are three keyboard actions that I hope you'll find very useful. I definitely use them day to day in my Wagtail content. Uh so it's just so useful to have options when you're creating content. And I just wanted to go ahead and say if you are curious about Autosave and Wagtail, we do have some news coming up in our live demo session in May. I would love to see all of you there. We have two different times.

Pick the time that works best for your time zone. I have a sign-up link along with our usual link to our newsletter down in the video description.