Hint Mode in Chrome (2026)

Hold Shift (the default trigger) and colored letter badges appear over the links, buttons, and inputs 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 on by default, so there is no setup. To turn it off, go to SuperchargeNavigation Settings under Keyboard Shortcuts.

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 676 possible pairs before any cap is reached.

The Three Chord Variants

Typing a hint label alone activates the element. With the default trigger, two modifier chords change what happens on activation:

The peek and background chords cover link and URL targets; non-link targets fall back to a normal click.

If you set Alt as your trigger, the chord roles shift to stay non-conflicting: bare Alt activates hints, Shift becomes the peek modifier, and Ctrl stays the background-tab modifier. 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.

Alt+Shift+P does something different: it toggles a per-site pause for the current domain, outside text inputs. On sites with their own Shift-based shortcuts (Google Docs, Figma, certain web apps), the pause stops all SuperchargeNavigation content-script shortcuts on that domain until you re-enable them. The same toggle is available from the in-page sidebar header and from the Alt+K command palette. The pause persists across page loads.

How Labels Are Assigned

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 skips it and assigns the next available label.

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. While typing to select, a pill at the bottom of the viewport shows the characters you have typed and a live match count — or “no match” in red if nothing on the page fits.

When This Replaces the Mouse

Long-form reading with lots of links: Hold Shift, and the links on the page get badges. Type the badges to open sections and pages one after another.

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 the result links, and type the badge while holding Alt to open a link as a Glance overlay. Read, close, move to the next badge. No new tabs accumulate. With peek-by-default on in Settings, the roles reverse: bare typing peeks and Alt clicks.

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.