google has announced that it adds the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to cut, copy, and paste files in Drive, as long as you’re using Chrome. The function uses the — okay, wait a minute. Are you really trying to tell me we can’t do this already?
Sure enough, when I went to Google Drive on the web and pressed Command + C on a file, then went to a folder and pressed Command + V, nothing happened. And this archive from December 2021 from Drive’s list of keyboard shortcuts says nothing about the functions. That’s fine, it really is — it’s not like copy, cut, and paste shortcuts have been around since the functions’ invention in the 1970s.
However, the feature is rolling out now, and Google’s message says you can use the standard Control/Command + C, X, and V to copy and move files like you would in pretty much any other file manager. The company says the feature should be available to everyone on June 4.
While Google’s all late for the party on this, at least its implementation is not half-hearted. Yes, it adds the basic keyboard shortcuts, but the feature also works on different tabs (Google also added a keyboard shortcut to open a folder as a new tab: Ctrl/Cmd + Enter). And if you copy a file and then try to paste it into, say, a Google doc or email, the file’s title and a link to it will be inserted.
You can also paste shortcuts to files if you don’t want duplicate versions in your entire cloud storage system. The command for that is Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + V.
Google has been doing a great job of adding better late than never features lately — on Wednesday it announced the ability to select multiple blocks of text is coming to Google Docs.
