Filter Gmail Messages Shortcut

May 29, 2024

Name

Piotr Stojanow

Twitter

@piotrstojanow

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I have a Gmail account only for subscribing to newsletters, blogs and substacks. Often, I find myself selecting one or more emails and filtering them for an impromptu reading list. Not only does it save me from switching reading contexts, but it is also a great way to archive/delete multiple emails at once. Labels alone can’t solve this use case.

There is no keyboard shortcut to do this. You can press . (period) for the dropdown “More” menu, navigate up/down a few times with cursor keys and select “Filter messages like these” with Enter.

Since I mainly use the keyboard to navigate in Gmail and want to save myself a few clicks, I created the following userscript (GitHub) to add a shortcut (“alt+g”) for the above workflow.

(function() {
  'use strict'

  function handleKeyPress(event) {
    if (event.altKey && event.code === 'KeyG') {
      const main = document.querySelector('div[role=main]');
      const emailElements = main.querySelectorAll('tr')

      const selectedEmailRows = Array.from(emailElements).filter((row) => {
        const tdElements = row.querySelectorAll('td');

        const hasAriaChecked = Array.from(tdElements).some((td) => {
          const isChecked = td.querySelector('div[aria-checked]')

          if (isChecked) {
            return isChecked.getAttribute('aria-checked') === 'true'
          }
        });

        const hasEmailSpan = row.querySelector('span[email]');

        return hasAriaChecked && hasEmailSpan;
      });

      if (selectedEmailRows.length === 0) {
        selectedEmailRows = [emailElements[1]]
      }

      let emails = []

      selectedEmailRows.filter((emailRow) => {
        const emailElement = emailRow.querySelector('td span[email]')
        const emailAddress = emailElement.getAttribute('email');
        emails.push(encodeURIComponent(emailAddress))
      })

      const searchUrl = `https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from:(${emails.join(' OR ')})`;

      window.location.href = searchUrl;
    }
  }

  document.addEventListener('keydown', handleKeyPress);
})();

If you prefer a bookmarklet just drag and drop the following button to your bookmark bar:

Select the emails you want to filter and click the bookmarklet (or set a keyword for it and run it from the address bar).

UPDATE (13-06-2024): I’ve modified the script to allow filtering based on an opened email. Open any email and press “alt+g” to filter all messages from the same sender.