Looker Keyboard Shortcuts

Whether you're a Looker developer, and analyst exploring data, or just viewing dashboards, knowing some keyboard shortcuts is a massive timesaver.

There are different shortcuts depending on if you're browsing folders, in a dashboard, Exploring, or in the IDE, and a couple that apply everywhere.

Wherever you are, you can use ? to display a list of the shortcuts - that's shift + ?. Shortcuts will be slightly different if you're using a Mac like me or Windows, but the lists should display the correct ones for your platform. Usually if a Mac shortcut uses the command key, on Windows it's control.

The ones I use the most are:

commmand + ; - toggle the (new) navigation menu on the left hand side.

control + shift + d - toggle development mode.

These two work everywhere.

When developing, note that if your cursor is in the code editor, some shortcuts won't work (and some apply specifically to editing code). Whether you've chosen emacs or vim for your Text Editor Mode will also affect how the keyboard works in the editor.

command + z and command + shift + z for undo/redo are invaluable. Those, and command + s to save your changes are firmly in my muscle memory. command + option + 0 to collapse the LookML code is also really handy when working with large files.

There are also a few shortcuts to help editing code in bulk - indent/outdent, shifting groups of lines up/down, and multi-line/column selection.

When you're Exploring, command + enter and command + shift + enter will run your query/clear cache and run respectively. command + k clears all fields & filters, and really useful one, command + option + k clears fields only but leaves filters as they are.

There's also an easter egg shortcut when Exploring - try the "Replace text" shortcut, option + shift + b. 😄