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How did CMD-K come to be the standard shortcut for both adding a hyperlink and opening a command palette?

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Asked<br>1 year, 2 months ago

Modified<br>8 months ago

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⌘+K (or CTRL+K on Windows) is the standard keyboard shortcut for two extremely different actions, even in tools that necessitate both actions.

Adding a hyperlink

Highlighting text and then hitting ⌘+K is the standard keyboard shortcut to add a hyperlink to the highlighted text in nearly every email platform, word processor, presentation software, most rich text editors (notably excluding Stack Exchange's, where it inexplicably formats the highlighted text as code), and much more. I'm not sure when this became common practice, but I have memories of using it for well over a decade.

More recently, various tools have introduced the pattern of highlighting text and then hitting ⌘+V to add a hyperlink using a URL from the user's clipboard. As far as I know Slack has been doing this the longest, but you can also see it in Notion, Figma, and many others. I quite like this pattern and am glad it's becoming more common, but I wouldn't necessarily refer to it as "standard practice" yet.

Opening a command palette

Many tools use ⌘+K as the shortcut to open a command palette. Examples include Discord, Slack, Todoist, Github, Webflow, Spotify, Figma, Linear, and more. This pattern is so common that these command palettes are often referred to as "kbars" or "kmenus."

This interaction hasn't been around as long, and before ⌘+K became common, there were other contenders. My favorite shortcut to open a command palette was ⌘+/, but it seems that's more or less died out.

Sometimes it's both

A predictable consequence of the same keyboard shortcut being commonly used to trigger two different interactions is that users who switch between multiple applications throughout their day (which is likely most people) get confused and frustrated. Some tools even support both interactions, which is also confusing.

In Jira for example, ⌘+K brings up the command palette unless a text input is focused, in which case it inserts a hyperlink.

How did we get here, and what's the best way forward?

When the first few teams to implement a command palette brainstormed different options for what specific keyboard shortcut should do this, how did they come to settle on ⌘+K? Since it's been so widely used to insert a hyperlink for over a decade, you'd think they would've quickly ruled that out. We know there were other options, so I assume they might've had a good reason for choosing ⌘+K that I'm just overlooking.

And if a product is about to release a command palette but currently uses ⌘+K to insert a hyperlink, what should they do?

keyboard-shortcuts<br>conventions<br>microinteractions<br>history

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edited Mar 25, 2025 at 19:34

Luciano

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asked Feb 22, 2025 at 15:33

Chloe

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Wow, I never expected to see a question on UX SE that I can actually answer...

Short answer : In 2014, a random Slack user (me) picked Cmd-K (and Ctrl-K) arbitrarily as the shortcut for a demo quick-switcher, and shared it with Slack. Slack then built it, and popularised the shortcut.

Longer answer:

In 2014 the company I worked for was hosting a "hack day". The intention was to create something from scratch - but I thought it would be fun to take the term literally and try to hack (into) something instead. For my target, I picked Slack.

It took less time than I'd expected to find a relatively mild XSS exploit (you can see the exploit in action here) - meaning that, in theory, I could make Slack run any code I wanted on another user's device.

So now I had an exploit, but what to do with it? I still had hours remaining in the day - and at that time my biggest UX gripe with Slack was how long it used to take to switch between chats. Back in 2014 you had to scroll the list of users on the left and manually click on the chat you wanted to switch to, which drove me up the wall daily. So - with the rest of my hack day I chose to build a "quick switch" function for the Slack Mac app, using the code-execution exploit above.

After slapping together some code and getting a working version running... my hack-day demo was minutes away and I desperately needed a shortcut to pop up the switcher.. the first one or two I tried were already taken and in a panic I looked at my keyboard for letters that I didn't use as shortcuts... "K" stuck out to me immediately (it...