Editing tests faster with keyboard shortcuts

Once you've built a few tests in Examplary, you'll notice the same actions coming back again and again: adding a question, moving it up a bit, duplicating one that's almost right, undoing a change you didn't mean to make. All of these can be done with the mouse — but they're much faster from the keyboard.

This guide walks through the keyboard shortcuts available in the test editor, from navigating between questions to reordering, duplicating, and deleting them without ever leaving your keyboard.

The command palette: one shortcut to rule them all

If you only remember one shortcut, make it this one: press Ctrl + K (⌘ K on Mac) anywhere in Examplary to open the command palette.

The command palette is a searchable list of everything you can do on the current page. Start typing — "duplicate", "settings", "undo" — and press Enter to run the matching action. You don't need to memorise anything else: every action in the palette shows its keyboard shortcut right next to it, so you naturally pick up the shortcuts for the things you do most often.

Moving between questions

While editing a test, you can jump between questions without touching the mouse:

These work even while you're typing in a question, so you can finish writing an answer option and hop straight to the next question with Ctrl + ↓. When you reach the bottom of the test, the selection wraps around to the first question again.

Working on the selected question

When a question is selected (click it, or navigate to it with the shortcuts above), these shortcuts act on that question:

A few of these deserve a special mention:

• Duplicate is great when you're writing a series of similar questions — set up the first one the way you like it, then press Ctrl + D and only change what differs.
• Move up and move down make reordering effortless. Hold Ctrl + Shift and tap the arrow keys repeatedly to walk a question through the test to its new spot.
• Insert a formula drops a math formula into the question text — handy for maths and science tests.

Adding questions

Press Ctrl + Shift + = (⌘ ⇧ = on Mac — think of it as pressing "plus") to jump straight to the Add question section at the bottom of the test, with the AI question input focused and ready. Type what you want the question to be about, and the AI writes a draft for you.

Prefer to add a specific question type yourself? Each question type has its own shortcut: a keyboard hint is shown in the corner of every tile in the Add question section (for example ⌘ plus a letter or number). Press it from anywhere in the editor and a fresh question of that type is added to the end of your test, ready to fill in.

Undo, redo, and the rest of the test

Some shortcuts work on the test as a whole:

Undo and redo cover everything you do in the editor — text edits, deleted questions, reordering — so you can experiment freely. And because Examplary saves your test continuously as you type, there's no save shortcut to remember: there's simply nothing to save.

Starting from the tests overview

The overview page where all your tests live has a few shortcuts of its own:

So the quickest way from "I need a new quiz" to actually writing questions is: open Examplary, press C, and start typing.

Building the habit

You don't need to learn all of these at once. A gentle way to build the habit:

1. Start with the command palette (Ctrl + K / ⌘ K) and use it for everything. It shows the shortcuts as you go.
2. Next, adopt the navigation keys — Ctrl + ↑ and Ctrl + ↓ — since moving between questions is the thing you do most.
3. Finally, add duplicate, move, and delete once reordering by hand starts to feel slow.

After a test or two, your hands will know the shortcuts before you do — and building a twenty-question test will feel a lot lighter.