Front Keyboard Shortcuts
Front deliberately borrows a large chunk of its shortcut scheme from Gmail's conventions (J/K for message navigation, C for compose), a reasonable choice given its core audience is teams already fluent in Gmail-style email management who are adopting Front specifically to add collaboration features like internal comments and assignment on top of a familiar inbox paradigm. Where Front's shortcuts diverge from a typical inbox is around its team-collaboration layer — assigning conversations, adding internal comments visible only to teammates, and snoozing — features that don't exist in a personal email client and therefore have no direct shortcut precedent to borrow from. Front ships as both a browser app and a native desktop wrapper, and the shortcut layer is identical either way, so switching between them mid-workday costs nothing beyond the usual Cmd swap on Mac. Support and sales teams sharing a single inbox address — a general support@ or sales@ alias multiple people need visibility into — are Front's core use case, and the collaboration-specific shortcuts exist precisely to solve the coordination problem that arises the moment more than one person can see and potentially reply to the same incoming message, where without clear assignment and internal-comment conventions, two teammates replying to the same customer independently becomes a real and recurring risk.
Inbox Navigation
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Next message/conversation | J | J | Steps the selection highlight down to the next thread in whichever shared inbox is currently open, using the same j-key convention Gmail popularized for keyboard-driven inbox navigation. |
| Previous message/conversation | K | K | Steps back up to the previous item in the current inbox view — the K half of the J/K pairing Front deliberately mirrors from Gmail's navigation scheme, aimed at support and sales teams already fluent in that convention from years of triaging email, so switching to Front from Gmail-based workflows requires relearning almost nothing about list navigation specifically. |
| Open selected conversation | Enter | Return | Opens the currently highlighted conversation for reading and replying, expanding it from the list view into full detail. |
| Archive conversation | E | E | Archives the current conversation, removing it from the active inbox view while keeping it searchable and accessible from the archive. |
| Focus search | / | / | Sends keyboard focus directly into the search field without a mouse click needed, ready to look up a conversation by sender, subject, or its actual content across the whole shared inbox. |
Team Collaboration
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assign conversation to teammate | A | A | Brings up the teammate picker for the open conversation so ownership can be handed off directly, a shared-inbox capability that simply doesn't exist as a concept in a personal, single-user mailbox. |
| Add internal comment | Shift+C | Shift+C | Toggles the compose box into internal-comment mode, seen only by teammates and never delivered to the customer, the space for coordinating on how a conversation should be handled without any risk of it leaking out. |
| Snooze conversation | H | H | Pulls a conversation out of the active inbox view for now, scheduled to resurface automatically at a time you pick, ideal for a thread that's blocked on someone else replying before you can move it forward. |
| Mention a teammate in a comment | Type @ in comment field | Type @ | Typing @ within an internal comment opens a teammate picker, tagging that person and typically triggering a notification to them about the comment. |
Composing
| Action | Windows | Mac | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compose new message | C | C | Opens a blank compose window for starting a new outbound message from one of your connected channels, another direct borrow from Gmail's compose shortcut. |
| Reply to conversation | R | R | Brings up the reply box for the open conversation, defaulting to addressing whoever sent the original message. |
| Send composed message | Ctrl+Enter | Cmd+Return | Sends the currently composed reply or new message immediately. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many Front shortcuts feel identical to Gmail's?
Front's target users are largely teams migrating from Gmail-based shared inboxes or personal Gmail habits, so borrowing J/K navigation, C for compose, and E for archive directly reduces the learning curve for that specific audience, rather than inventing a fresh scheme that would require relearning muscle memory that already exists.
What's the practical difference between archiving and snoozing a conversation?
Archive removes a conversation from the active inbox on the assumption it's fully handled and doesn't need to resurface on its own — you'd have to search for it deliberately to see it again. Snooze instead temporarily hides a conversation that isn't finished yet, automatically returning it to the active inbox at a specific chosen time, appropriate for something you're intentionally deferring rather than something that's actually done.
Are internal comments visible to the customer in any way?
No — internal comments (Shift+C) are explicitly separated from the customer-facing message thread and are never sent externally regardless of how the conversation is later replied to or forwarded; Front visually distinguishes comments from actual sent messages with a different background color specifically to reduce the risk of a teammate mistakenly treating a comment as an outbound reply.
What happens if two teammates try to reply to the same conversation at the same time?
Front typically shows a visual indicator when another teammate is actively viewing or drafting a reply to the same conversation, which reduces (though doesn't fully eliminate) the risk of duplicate or conflicting replies going out — combined with the Assign feature, most teams establish a norm where only the assigned teammate replies, using comments to coordinate if someone else needs to weigh in first.
Does assigning a conversation to a teammate notify them automatically?
Yes — assignment typically triggers a notification to the newly assigned teammate so they're aware ownership has shifted to them, similar in spirit to how mentioning someone in an internal comment notifies that specific person, both mechanisms existing specifically to keep a shared inbox from silently dropping conversations between team members.
Are Front's shortcuts available when using the mobile app?
No — the mobile app relies on touch gestures rather than a physical keyboard, meaning this entire set of key bindings only applies to the desktop browser and native desktop app; a support agent switching to mobile for on-the-go triage should expect a touch-driven interface instead of these key bindings.
Can I set up a keyboard shortcut to snooze a conversation for a specific custom duration rather than a preset option?
The Snooze shortcut (H) opens a picker that typically offers both common presets (like tomorrow morning or next week) and a custom date/time option, so while the keyboard shortcut itself just opens that picker rather than snoozing directly to a specific time, reaching a fully custom snooze duration is still just one additional click away rather than requiring a separate workflow.