Every After Effects keyboard shortcut worth learning

What are the most used After Effects keyboard shortcuts?

Start with these thirteen. They cover the everyday jobs: preview, split, trim, move, show properties, ease and save. Once they are habit, use the grouped tables further down. All of them come from Adobe's own After Effects keyboard shortcuts reference, checked on 3 November 2026.

This page lists the shortcuts we checked line by line against Adobe's page, not every row of it. Adobe's table runs much longer. For anything missing here, open the shortcut editor: its Command list shows every command that can take a shortcut, and you can search it.

What are the general and composition shortcuts in After Effects?

The general shortcuts are the ones you already know from other apps: undo, redo, select all, duplicate and save. The composition group adds new comps, comp settings and the work area keys B and N.

General and saving

Compositions and the work area

A quick way to shorten a comp: select the layers you want to keep, press Ctrl + Alt + B to fit the work area to them, then Ctrl + Shift + X to trim the comp to that work area. On a Mac, swap in Command and Option.

How do I move around the timeline with the keyboard in After Effects?

Use Home and End to jump to the start and end, I and O to jump to a layer's In and Out points, and Page Down to step one frame forward. Spacebar starts and stops the preview.

Time navigation and previews

Tools

Laptop keyboards often hide Page Down, Home and End behind a function key. The arrow versions in the table do the same jobs, so use those when the dedicated keys are awkward to reach.

Which After Effects shortcuts split, trim and move layers?

Split with Ctrl + Shift + D, trim to the playhead with Alt + [ and Alt + ], and slide a layer so it starts or ends at the playhead with [ and ]. On macOS, Command replaces Ctrl and Option replaces Alt.

Note the difference between the bracket pairs. [ moves the whole layer and keeps its length. Alt + [ cuts the head off and leaves the rest where it was. If you cut talking-head footage in After Effects, our guide to cutting and trimming video in After Effects walks through both. For stretching a layer or holding its last frame, see extending a layer, comp or last frame. For reverse and time remapping, see speeding up, slowing down or reversing video.

Precompose works on the whole selection at once. If you need one precomp per layer instead, that is a different job, covered in precomposing each layer separately.

How do I show just one property in the After Effects timeline?

Select a layer and press a single letter: P for Position, S for Scale, T for Opacity, RR for Time Remap and U for every property that has keyframes. These are the same on Windows and macOS.

RR is a double-letter shortcut: press R twice in quick succession. U is especially handy because it shows only what you have animated and hides the rest of the property tree.

These letters are fixed. Adobe's list of keys you cannot reassign includes P, PP, S, SS, T, TT, R, RR, U and UU, so there is no point planning a layout that moves them.

What are the keyframe and Easy Ease shortcuts in After Effects?

Select keyframes and press F9 for Easy Ease, Shift + F9 to ease in only, and Ctrl + Shift + F9 (Command + Shift + F9 on Mac) to ease out only. Shift + F3 flips between the Graph Editor and layer bars.

If F9 does nothing on a Mac, macOS may have taken it: Adobe notes that F9 to F12 may conflict with operating system shortcuts. The fixes, and what the ease does to your curves, are in our Easy Ease guide.

How do After Effects shortcuts differ on Mac and Windows?

They are the same shortcuts with different modifier names: Ctrl on Windows is Command on macOS, and Alt is Option. Single letters, brackets, function keys and Spacebar are identical on both.

• Split a layer: Ctrl + Shift + D becomes Command + Shift + D.
• Trim to the playhead: Alt + [ becomes Option + [.
• New adjustment layer: Ctrl + Alt + Y becomes Command + Option + Y.
• Shift stays Shift. Shift + F9 and Shift + F3 are the same on both.

The platform difference Adobe calls out is function keys on macOS. Adobe's reference warns that shortcuts using F9 to F12 may conflict with the operating system, and points to macOS Help to reassign the Dashboard & Expose shortcuts. If your Easy Ease opens a system feature instead, that is the cause.

Keyboard language matters too. When After Effects detects a keyboard it doesn't support, the shortcut editor shows the U.S. English layout. On a non-US keyboard, check bracket and comma shortcuts in the editor before you rely on them.

How do I change keyboard shortcuts in After Effects?

Open Edit › Keyboard Shortcuts, or press Ctrl + Alt + ' on Windows or Option + Command + ' on macOS. Find the command, type the new keys, then save your set with Save As.

1. Open the editor. It has three parts: the Keyboard layout, the Command list and the Key modifier list. The After Effects Default preset shows first.
2. Read the colours. Gray keys have no shortcut. Purple keys hold application-wide shortcuts. Green keys hold panel-specific shortcuts. Hover over a key to see the full command name and whether it is an Application or Panel shortcut.
3. Search the Command list for the command you want.
4. Select it and type the shortcut in the text field, or click in the shortcut column and press the keys, modifiers included. You can also drag a command onto a key in the keyboard layout or onto the Key modifier list, or drag a key onto a command.
5. Watch for a conflict warning at the bottom of the editor. The clashing command is highlighted in blue; click it to select it in the Command list. Undo and Clear, in the lower right, become active.
6. Press Save As to keep your set.

Two rules catch people out. First, a panel shortcut that uses the same keys as an application shortcut wins while that panel is active, so the application shortcut stops working there. Switch the Command drop-down to a panel view to see those. Second, After Effects does not let you reassign A, AA, E, EE, F, FF, L, LL, M, MM, P, PP, R, RR, S, SS, T, TT, U or UU.

For a longer walkthrough, see how to change keyboard shortcuts in After Effects.

How do I put After Effects shortcuts on mouse buttons?

Give each spare mouse button a keystroke from the tables above, set only for After Effects. Your mouse maker's software or a remapping app sends the keystroke, and After Effects responds to it as it would to the keyboard.

Pick the shortcuts you press most often while your hand is already on the mouse. A sensible first set:

• Side button 1: Split layer, Ctrl + Shift + D (Command + Shift + D).
• Side button 2: Easy Ease, F9.
• Hold side button and scroll: Go forward 1 frame (Page Down) in one direction, and the go-back-one-frame command in the other. Find it in the editor's Command list.
• Middle click: U, to show what you've animated.
• Chords or gestures: the trims Alt + [ and Alt + ], and Precompose.

Two checks if a button seems dead. Make sure the right panel has focus, because green panel shortcuts only fire in their own panel. And for double-letter shortcuts like RR, the button has to send two quick presses, so set it up as a short macro, not a single key.

For the operating-system side, see our step-by-step guides to remapping mouse buttons on Windows 11 and remapping mouse buttons on a Mac.

Where mouzeclick fits (we make it)

We make mouzeclick, so read this as our own pitch. It puts After Effects shortcuts on any mouse, per app, and adds a wheel of 114 After Effects tools. The mouse app and the Tool wheel run on Windows and Mac; the workspace panel is Windows only.

Shortcuts on any mouse (Windows and Mac)

• It works with any mouse your computer sees, with up to five standard buttons plus scroll and tilt. There is no driver.
• Buttons work per app: Mouse 4 can split a layer in After Effects and do something else in your browser, switching the moment you change windows.
• Each button has eleven slots: tap, hold and move in four directions, a chord with another button, or hold and scroll. Hold and scroll suits frame stepping.
• Pick from 309 built-in shortcuts on Windows, After Effects among them, or record your own. Macros chain keys, clicks, waits and typed text, which covers double-letter keys.
• The Options wheel holds 48 favourites per app on three rings. The app includes ready-made wheels for Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop and CapCut.

One clash to fix on day one: the Orbit switch opens with F9 by default, which is also Easy Ease. Move Orbit to a side button or another key. On a MacBook keyboard the wheels use Fn + F8 and Fn + F9.

The After Effects Tool wheel (Windows and Mac)

The After Effects Tool wheel opens with F10 or a held right button. It holds 114 tools in 13 groups, with four starting layouts: Default, Motion Design, Animate and Finishing. Each action is one undo step. It rigs a Null + Parent in one flick, and its Anchor grid moves the anchor without moving the layer. An effect picked with nothing selected makes its own adjustment layer. It needs the bridge, installed once from the app's Tool wheel page. If you're weighing a toolbar against a wheel, our KBar alternative comparison sets the two side by side.

The workspace (Windows only)

On Windows, the After Effects workspace adds a Toolbox with a 9-button anchor grid, one-click nulls, solids and adjustment layers, Comp cut and Split layer. The Mac app does not include the workspaces. The 15 After Effects extensions run on both.

mouzeclick needs an internet connection while it runs. Mac users install it in four steps from the Mac install page. The trial is 3 days with no card, and every After Effects tool works fully. Plans are in the pricing section.

Questions people ask

Sources

Checked on 2026-11-03. Prices and features change: each link goes to the maker's own page.

1. Adobe: After Effects keyboard shortcuts reference

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