Arc Page Navigation & Developer Shortcuts

The Command Bar is the exception worth understanding first. Cmd+L opens it prefilled with the current URL, which is the address-bar behaviour every browser has; Cmd+T opens it empty for a new destination. The distinction is between editing where you are and going somewhere else, and because both routes lead to the same interface, the Command Bar ends up handling navigation, search, tab switching and command invocation through a single input. Typing the name of an action there also reveals its keyboard binding, which makes it a reasonable substitute for a shortcuts reference while you are already reaching for the command. Finding on a page is Cmd+F with Cmd+G and Cmd+Shift+G stepping through matches, all standard. Cmd+Option+F is not standard: it opens find-and-replace, and it works inside editable fields on a page. A browser shipping replace is unusual, and it is genuinely useful for anyone who works in web-based editors and text areas where the surrounding application offers nothing of the kind. Copying the current URL has a dedicated binding on Cmd+Shift+C, which saves selecting the Command Bar and copying from it. The variant is the one worth remembering: Cmd+Shift+Option+C copies the page as a Markdown link with the title already filled in. For anyone writing documentation, notes or issue comments, that removes a small, constant, several-times-a-day irritation — the round trip of copying a URL, pasting it, then going back for the title. History on Cmd+Y is where Arc's two kinds of memory need distinguishing. History records pages you visited, as in any browser. The Archive holds tabs that were open in a Space and have since been cleared, whether by Cmd+W, by Cmd+Shift+K, or by automatic tidying. A tab you had open yesterday morning is in the Archive; a page you clicked through in April is in history. The Command Bar searches both, which is usually the fastest route when you do not know which you want — and knowing that the distinction exists is what stops people concluding a tab has vanished when it has simply been filed somewhere they were not looking. Developer tools are Chromium's, unmodified: Cmd+Option+I opens DevTools, Cmd+Option+J goes straight to the console, Cmd+Option+C to element inspection. Nothing about Arc's interface layer changes what happens once DevTools is open, and extensions installed from the Chrome Web Store work with their own shortcuts intact. The one thing to watch is collision — Arc has claimed several combinations Chrome leaves free, so an extension binding that worked elsewhere can be intercepted here. Extension shortcuts are reassignable from the same Chromium settings page Chrome uses, which resolves it. Zoom is worth one note of its own because of how it interacts with Split View. Arc remembers zoom per site rather than per tab, following Chromium's model, so a level you set while reading a page full-width applies to that same site when it later appears in a narrow split pane. A site comfortable at 110% across a full display can be unusably cramped at a third of it, and correcting it in the pane changes the setting everywhere. Responsive sites generally handle the narrower width without help; fixed-width layouts are the ones that force the choice. The menu bar is the last thing worth mentioning, because Arc hides it. Running without visible browser chrome is part of the design, but the standard macOS menus are still there — moving the cursor to the top of the screen reveals them, and they carry the current keyboard bindings for your specific build. Given that Arc's shortcuts shifted during its active development and that any published reference is a snapshot, those menus are the authoritative answer for the version you actually have installed. Because the engine underneath is Chromium, a useful rule of thumb covers most of what is not listed here: if a shortcut is standard in Chrome and Arc has not visibly reinvented the feature, it almost certainly works unchanged. Text editing, page scrolling, form navigation, print, save-page, view-source and the whole developer-tools keymap all fall into that category. Arc's genuine departures are concentrated in the areas it actually redesigned — tabs, Spaces, the Command Bar, Split View — and outside those it is a conventional Chromium browser wearing an unconventional interface. That also means the reverse holds for troubleshooting. A keyboard problem in a text field, a form, or DevTools is a Chromium problem and Chrome's documentation applies directly. A keyboard problem involving the sidebar, a Space, a split or the Archive is Arc-specific, and Chrome's documentation will not mention it at all — which is a quick way of deciding where to look when something is not behaving.