Assign Keyboard Shortcut to Pin Tab in Browsers

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If you are someone who works with a specific set of websites, there’s a good chance you have them pinned on your favorite browser. Pinning tabs has several benefits, including automatically opening websites on starting the browser, saving tab-strip space for other websites, and it also prevents accidental closing of important websites.

On most browsers, to pin a website, you just have to right-click on the website’s tab and select “Pin Tab.” If you regularly pin and unpin tabs, or if you primarily work on a laptop, using a quick keyboard shortcut to pin and unpin websites can be a real time and effort saver.

Assign Keyboard Shortcut to Pin Browser Tabs

In this post, we will be looking at how we can add a keyboard shortcut functionality to pin or unpin a website on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. These browsers do not have a built-in option to assign hotkeys to toggle pin/unpin tabs, but thankfully, there are browsers extensions to help us out here.

Keyboard Shortcut to Pin Google Chrome Tab

Earlier we had covered an extension called Shortkeys (Custom Keyboard Shortcuts) that allows users to add or customize default Chrome shortcuts. With Shortkeys you can add, disable, or change shortcut keys for most of the actions in Chrome. However, if you are looking for something simple that works straight out of the box, you can also have a look at Tab Pinner (Keyboard Shortcuts).

To start using Tab Pinner, just head over to Chrome Web Store and install the extension by clicking on the “Add to Chrome” button. Once installed, you just have to press Ctrl+Shift+X on your keyboard to pin any website. Here’s a small video demonstrating the feature:

Install: Tab Pinner (Keyboard Shortcuts)

Keyboard Shortcut to Pin Firefox Tab

In Firefox, we can make use of an aptly named add-on “Toggle Pin Tab” to pin/unpin the current website. To install it, go to the extension’s page on Firefox Add-ons repository and click on “Add to Firefox” button.
Toggle Pin Tab Firefox add-on
Once installed, you can any toggle the pin status of the current tab by simply pressing Alt+P on the keyboard.

Install: Toggle Pin Tab

Keyboard Shortcut to Pin Opera Tab

Even though Opera has built-in support for several advanced settings, it doesn’t offer one to toggle pin/unpin of a tab. Once again, we have a highly useful extension named “Shortkeys” to fix this.
Shortkeys for Opera
To install Shortkeys, go to the Opera add-ons page for the extension and click on “Add to Opera” button.

Shortkeys requires a little amount of work before you can start using it. After installing, go to the extension’s options page to select a key binding, action, and site’s on which you’d like the hotkey to work.

For our use case, you could use something like Ctrl+Shift+X for key binding, “Pin/unpin tab” for action, and “All sites” for active on. Finally, click on “Save” button. To see if it works, simply open a new tab or refresh one of the tabs you already open, and press the newly assigned keyboard shortcut.

Shortkeys comes with an option to import and export settings. This could be useful if you have a lot of customized keyboard combinations.

Install: Shortkeys