YouTube Keyboard Video Controls

I was on a learning kick and watching a bunch of videos on the YouTube and what really helped me was the keyboard controls. I found this support article on Google about YouTube keyboard shortcuts. Once you master these keyboard controls, you definitely won’t regret knowing them.

The J, K, and L.

J jumps backwards 10 seconds, L jumps forwards 10 seconds. K stops and starts.

If you are a typist or if you are studying a video and taking notes in another window and you alt-tab between the video and your notes, you can easily repeat that last 10 seconds or further back if you need to. Then jump forward to get back to where you need to be. Try it out!

PowerTip! J and L also work in your Gmail inbox to go up and down the emails both while you are in the inbox view and while you are reading an email.

The j, k, and l navigation and playback shortcuts originated from a 1976 computer terminal layout used while programming the Unix text editor vi. [1]

• The Learner Terminal: Bill Joy created vi at UC Berkeley using an ADM-3A “dumb terminal,” whose physical keyboard lacked dedicated arrow keys. [1]
• The Arrow Labels: Instead of separate arrows, the directional symbols were printed directly on the H (left), J (down), K (up), and L (right) keys. [1]
• Modern Adoption: Programmers raised on Unix carried these muscle-memory habits into modern applications like Gmail (j/k to move through messages) and YouTube (j/l to skip backward/forward 10 seconds, k to pause). [1, 2, 3]

If you are impatient with how slow some people in videos talk, the < and > keys, if you touch type, its Shift and , or Shift and . will speed up or slow down the video by .25 and it really helps. I can only watch learning videos at 1.5 speed or higher nowadays. I don’t know why people can’t be brief on topics.

Go try these shortcuts! I recommend this YouTube channel called freeCodeCamp.