I’ve got very used to using keyboard shortcuts in GMail, especially “]”, which just archives the message you’re reading and moves on to the next one. Bang-bang-bang through my email, luvvly jubbly. Now, I know Google doesn’t really want you to delete messages, but I often like to, because I don’t want junk messages appearing in searches in the future. So what I really want, alongside “archive and next”, is “delete and next”.
Unfortunately, that’s not available, but there’s a quick enough way to do it. If you hit “#”, it deletes a message. Herein lies the problem – at this point, you’re sent back to the main inbox view. So how do we delete and move to the next message? Quite simple: when you’re on the main inbox view, hitting “o” will open the next message. So a quick combination of “#” then “o” deletes the current message and moves on to the next one.
The last problem, which will immediately occur to many people, is avoiding the use of the “#” key, which, er, doesn’t exist on UK Mac keyboards. To do this, go to Settings>Labs and turn on “Custom keyboard shortcuts”. Then set an alternative for “#” as “delete” – I noticed that “d” wasn’t used, so that’s a fairly good choice.
Now to delete a message and move to the next one, I just type in “do”.
Nice tip, but I prefer cmd+n to compose and “delete” key to delete messages. Like in native apps. cmd+n works in Mailplane but I can’t figure out other ones.
From Gmail’s Settings > Advanced screen, as in April 2019:
Auto-advance
Show the next conversation instead of your inbox after you delete, archive or mute a conversation. You can select whether to advance to the next or previous conversation on the ‘General settings’ page.
Thank you @Dan
@Dan, thanks for that. FYI to others, the Auto-Advance option is now under the Advanced settings section.