Google Drive performance updates add multi-text highlighting, copy/paste shortcuts.

The Google Workspace team is releasing several important updates to improve the performance of Google Drive.

You can now select multiple blocks of text at the same time in the document editor for quick editing. This is a feature that Microsoft Word has had for a while now, and it allows you to hold Ctrl, select multiple blocks of text, and apply a style. Unfortunately, Google Docs doesn’t use the obvious keyboard shortcut. According to the updated shortcuts page, you’ll need at least four fingers to do this. It’s Ctrl + Alt + Shift + left/right arrow on Windows or Ctrl + Cmd + Shift + left/right arrow on Mac. From there, Google says you need to “use [] the left/right arrow to navigate to the individual section of text you also want to select.”

The next very simple addition is the keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste in the Google Drive file browser. The ability to copy and paste in text editors has always existed, but now you can do it in the Drive web file manager, which was not possible before. It’s strange that it took Google so long to implement this feature, but there’s a lot of abstraction between you and the Google Drive JavaScript app. If you copy a Google Docs document, you are not actually copying the file to the clipboard because the file is on the web. You’re moving organizational links using the clipboard, which JavaScript doesn’t even have read access to.You could also always install the Drive sync app and manage files through your operating system’s file manager, but now the web version is getting that functionality.

Both features are being rolled out now. Multitext selection should be available to everyone in about 15 days, and copy/paste to Drive will take about a month.

Listed image from Google Drive