CommandUI – The Fastest Way to Navigate WordPress

CommandUI is an impressive WordPress plugin developed by Calvin Alkan. It enables you to go to various parts of the WordPress dashboard using the keyboard and is a great time-saver, especially for power users and those who spend a lot of time daily administering one or more WordPress sites.

It is a premium plugin and the pricing is yet to be announced.

I had a chance to test it out and here are some notes.

• Once active, CommandUI’s launcher can be invoked by pressing ⌘k (⌃k for Windows users) or ⇧⇧. This primary modifier key can be changed in the launcher by going to Internal → Keyboard Shortcuts. The available options are ⌘, ⌃ and ⌥.
• To dismiss the launcher, press Esc
• To navigate back to the root within CommandUI, press delete (or backspace) as many times as needed.
• There are some quick shortcuts we can type even w/o bringing up the launcher! These also work when we are on the front end
  • ga (go admin) to go to the dashboard
  • gh (go home) to go to the homepage/frontend
  • c to create a post/Page/CPT item/menu/pattern/taxonomy/field group etc.
  • pt (post type) to bring up a list of all the post types. This lets you quickly edit (with WP or Bricks) or view any post/Page/CPT item
  • e (edit) to the current single Page/post/CPT item
  • b (edit in Bricks) the current single Page/post/CPT item
  • uu to search users
  • gt (go to) and begin typing the name of the page you want to get to. Ex.: reading
  • pa (plugins activate) to activate plugins
  • pd (plugins deactivate) to deactivate plugins
  • pr (plugins repository) to search plugins and install/visit the repo listing
  • v to view the current Bricks Page/template being edited with Bricks on the front end (at this time, there is no preview option that auto-reloads like the Bricks preview does)
• The above quick shortcuts are optional, and if you do not want to remember or forget them, all the above actions can easily be invoked by bringing up the launcher
• Holding ⌘ down and hitting ⏎ opens the pages in a new tab
• One of the side benefits of using this is getting rid of annoying popups that some plugins show when they are deactivated.
• Supports subsearch in to Bricks and WooCommerce settings. For example, we could bring up CommandUI and just begin typing ‘perf’ to see the option to go to Bricks > Settings > Performance.

What differentiates CommandUI from similar attempts is that this plugin is super fast and enables us to search and install plugins from the WP repo. I consider it a must-have plugin for WordPress enthusiasts.