Evernote Keyboard Shortcuts
Evernote predates most of the modern note-taking app wave, and its shortcuts reflect an older, more conventional approach to text editing and note management rather than the block-based or Markdown-typed conventions newer tools like Notion favor — formatting shortcuts feel closer to a word processor, and the standout strength is genuinely fast global search across an entire note archive. The shortcuts below cover note creation and the main window, text formatting within a note, and Evernote's distinctive global search capability that can index text inside images and PDFs. A few older formatting shortcuts inherited from Evernote's early-2010s desktop client have quietly disappeared from newer builds, so a shortcut you remember from years ago may no longer exist in the current version. Web Clipper, a browser extension for saving articles, screenshots, or entire pages directly into Evernote from within the browser itself, extends the app's capture surface well beyond typed notes, and it's part of why Evernote's search needing to handle mixed content types (clipped web pages, PDFs, images) rather than pure typed text has always been more technically demanding than a plain-text note app's search. Because Evernote predates the mobile-first design era, its interface conventions occasionally feel more desktop-native than some competitors built mobile-first from day one, which is a real trade-off worth knowing if most of your actual usage happens on a phone rather than a computer. File attachments and internal note links round out Evernote's less-discussed but genuinely useful capabilities, since attaching a PDF or document directly to a note keeps supporting materials in the same searchable archive as everything else, and linking between related notes gives at least a lightweight cross-referencing capability on top of the primary notebook-and-tag organizational model.
Note Management
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create new note | Ctrl+N | Cmd+N | Drops a new blank note into whatever notebook is currently open, landing the cursor directly in the title field ready to type. |
| Create new notebook | Ctrl+Shift+N | Cmd+Shift+N | Opens the new notebook creation dialog, prompting for a name before adding it to the notebook list in the sidebar. |
| Delete current note | Ctrl+Delete (varies by version) | Cmd+Delete | Moves the currently selected note to Trash rather than permanently deleting it immediately, giving a recovery window before it's gone for good. |
| Print current note | Ctrl+P | Cmd+P | Opens the print dialog for the currently open note, rendering its content (including embedded images) for printing or saving as PDF. |
| Clip current webpage | Browser extension icon (no in-app key) | — | Saves an article, screenshot, or entire webpage directly into Evernote via the Web Clipper browser extension, extending the app's capture surface well beyond manually typed notes. |
| Add a tag to current note | Ctrl+Shift+T (varies) | Cmd+Shift+T | Applies a tag to the currently open note, Evernote's cross-notebook organizational mechanism that works alongside, rather than instead of, its notebook structure. |
| Attach a file to current note | Ctrl+Shift+A (varies) | Cmd+Shift+A | Attaches a file from your computer to the current note, embedding it inline where supported (like a PDF preview) or as a downloadable attachment for other file types. |
| Copy link to current note | Note menu > Copy Note Link (no keyboard shortcut) | — | Copies a direct link to the current note for pasting into another note, an email, or elsewhere, letting you cross-reference notes or share a specific one with another Evernote user who has access. |
Formatting
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bold selected text | Ctrl+B | Cmd+B | Applies bold formatting to the selected text within a note, standard rich-text behavior shared with most word processors. |
| Insert checkbox | Ctrl+Shift+C | Cmd+Shift+C | Inserts a clickable checkbox at the cursor position, turning a note into a checklist item-by-item — a frequently used shortcut for to-do-style notes. |
| Insert bulleted list | Ctrl+Shift+B | Cmd+Shift+B | Turns whatever line the cursor is on into a bulleted list entry, and the bullet format carries forward automatically on each new line until you deliberately break out of it. |
| Highlight selected text | Ctrl+Shift+H | Cmd+Shift+H | Applies a yellow highlight background to the selected text, useful for marking important passages within a longer note for quick visual scanning later. |
| Underline selected text | Ctrl+U | Cmd+U | Draws a line beneath the selected text, one of Evernote's handful of basic rich-text toggles that behaves exactly as it would in any standard word processor. |
| Italicize selected text | Ctrl+I | Cmd+I | Italicizes whatever text is selected inside a note, ordinary rich-text behavior that lines up with most word processors. |
Search
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global search across all notes | Ctrl+Q (varies) or Ctrl+Shift+F | Cmd+Q varies, or Cmd+Shift+F | Opens Evernote's search bar, scoped across your entire account by default — notably, Evernote's search also indexes legible text inside scanned images and attached PDFs, not just typed note content. |
| Search within current notebook | Ctrl+F (scoped) | Cmd+F | Narrows search scope to just the currently open notebook rather than the entire account, useful when you know roughly where a note lives but not its exact title. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Evernote's search really find text inside images?
Yes — Evernote runs optical character recognition (OCR) on images and scanned documents you add to notes, indexing any legible text it finds so it shows up in regular search results, which is one of Evernote's more distinctive long-standing features compared to plainer note apps.
Why does Ctrl+Q sometimes quit the application instead of opening search?
Ctrl+Q is reserved as a 'quit application' shortcut in many other Windows programs and even within some Evernote versions or configurations, so the exact search shortcut binding has shifted across releases — checking the Edit menu's Find submenu for the currently active binding in your installed version is more reliable than assuming a fixed key combination.
Is there a difference between deleting a note and removing it from a notebook?
Deleting a note moves it to the Trash notebook, where it remains recoverable for a period before permanent removal. There's no separate 'remove from notebook without deleting' action for a single note the way there might be in a tagging system — moving a note to a different notebook (not deleting it) is the correct action if you just want it organized elsewhere.
Can I save a whole webpage into Evernote, not just typed notes?
Yes, the Web Clipper browser extension lets you save an entire article, a screenshot, or a full webpage directly into Evernote, extending its capture surface well beyond manually typed content and feeding into the same global search that also indexes text within images and PDFs.
How do tags relate to notebooks in Evernote's organizational model?
Notebooks are the primary container a note lives in, similar to a folder, while tags work alongside notebooks as a cross-cutting organizational layer, letting a note be found through either its notebook or any tags applied to it, rather than tags replacing the notebook structure entirely.
Does Evernote feel outdated compared to newer note apps?
Somewhat, in the sense that Evernote was designed before mobile became the primary way most people write notes, and that shows in a few interface conventions that lean more toward a desktop-first mindset than an app built mobile-first from day one. It matters most if the bulk of your note-taking actually happens on a phone rather than a laptop.
Can I share a notebook with someone who does not have Evernote?
Sharing generally works best with another Evernote account for full collaborative access, though publicly shared note links can be viewed by anyone with the link even without their own account, depending on the sharing permissions chosen.
Can I link one note to another within Evernote?
Yes, Copy Note Link generates a direct internal link to the current note that can be pasted into another note's content, creating a clickable cross-reference between them, which is useful for building a lightweight web of related notes even though Evernote's core organizational model centers on notebooks and tags rather than a dedicated bidirectional-linking system the way a tool like Obsidian offers.