Hint Mode in Chrome — STOP Reaching for Your Mouse (2026)

Hold Shift on any page and colored letter badges appear over every link, button, and input visible in your viewport. Type the letters (one or two) and the element activates. Your hands never leave the keyboard. It works on standard HTML, ARIA widgets, and web components with shadow DOM.

Activating Hint Mode

Hint mode is off by default. Enable it once in SuperchargeNavigation Settings under Keyboard Shortcuts, then it’s available on every page.

Once enabled, hold Shift. Badges appear. Type the label. Done.

If Shift conflicts with your OS (some accessibility tools intercept it), switch the trigger in settings:

Slash modal mode is designed for laptop users on non-US keyboards where / requires Shift anyway. The extension detects the layout and handles it correctly.

What Gets a Hint Badge

Every element a user can meaningfully interact with gets a badge:

• Links (<a> tags): any href, including JavaScript links
• Buttons: <button>, <input type="submit">, <input type="button">, checkbox, radio
• Form fields: <select>, <textarea>, and all text input variants (search, email, url, tel, password, date, and more)
• ARIA widgets: roles: button, link, checkbox, radio, menuitem, tab, switch, option, searchbox, textbox, combobox
• Web components: SuperchargeNavigation pierces both open and closed shadow DOM roots, so complex sites like Reddit (which wraps its search input in a closed shadow tree) show hints correctly

Up to 400 in-viewport elements get badges. Beyond that, a further 200 off-screen elements are labeled and reachable by scrolling. The total cap is 600 per page.

Labels use a home-row weighted alphabet (asdfjklghvnbcmrutyeiwoqpxz) so the most common letters land under your strongest fingers. Common buttons get mnemonic shortcuts: “submit” → s, “login” → l, “cancel” → c, “download” → d. Dense pages with hundreds of elements fall back to two-letter combinations, giving 625 unique slots before any cap is reached.

The Three Chord Variants

Typing a hint label alone clicks the element. Two modifier chords change what happens on activation:

The peek chord is the fastest way to use Glance on a dense page. Instead of hovering for the right link and then holding Shift to click it, you hold Shift, type the two-letter badge, and the preview opens. One continuous motion.

If you set Alt as your trigger, the chord roles shift to stay non-conflicting: bare Alt activates hints, Shift becomes the peek modifier, Ctrl stays background tab. All four trigger configurations maintain distinct chord roles by construction.

Dismissing Hints and Per-Site Pause

Press Escape to clear hint badges without clicking anything. If a Glance overlay is open, Escape closes that first; if the Alt+K palette is open, Escape closes that next; only then does it clear hints. The priority chain means you never need to think about which Escape press does what.

Shift+Escape does something different: it toggles a per-site pause for the current domain. On sites with their own Shift-based shortcuts (Google Docs, Figma, certain web apps), one keystroke pauses all SuperchargeNavigation content-script shortcuts. This suppresses hints, type-to-select, Alt+scroll, rocker gestures, and Super Drag on that domain until you re-enable them. The pause persists across page loads.

How Labels Are Assigned

The label alphabet is asdfjklghvnbcmrutyeiwoqpxz (home-row characters first). Labels are assigned in viewport order (top-left to bottom-right) so spatial position is consistent across visits to the same page. Elements sharing the same screen coordinates within 12px are deduplicated to prevent badge stacking.

A small mnemonic table biases common actions toward their natural letter: “search” → s, “reply” → r, “next” → n, “previous” → p. When a mnemonic would collide with an already-assigned label, the system falls back to the next available character in the alphabet sequence.

Text inputs get hints too, but activation works differently: instead of simulating a click, hint activation focuses the field and selects its existing content. That is the expected behavior when landing in a form field via keyboard.

Settings

Hint mode and type-to-select share the same label rendering engine but activate differently. Type-to-select fires on bare letter keypresses when no input is focused; hint mode fires only while the trigger key is held.

When This Replaces the Mouse

Long-form reading with lots of links: Hold Shift, type s to open the next section in a background tab, type n for the next page. No scrolling back to the navigation bar.

Forms: Tab through fields normally, or hold Shift and jump directly to any input by label. Works on login pages, checkout flows, and web apps.

Dropdown menus and ARIA widgets: Badge overlays appear on menu items, tabs, and role=“button” elements. Sites built on component libraries (Material UI, Radix, Headless UI) hint correctly even when the underlying markup is unconventional.

Research with Glance: You’re on a search results page. Hold Shift, see badges on every result link, type the badge while holding Alt and the link opens as a Glance overlay. Read, close, move to the next badge. No new tabs accumulate.

Privacy

Hint mode runs entirely in the page’s content script context. No URLs, labels, or activation events are transmitted anywhere. The per-site pause list (nav.sitePausedDomains) is stored in chrome.storage.local on your device. Nothing leaves the browser.