Every MT4 keyboard shortcut, on one page

Yes, MT4 has hot keys, around fifty of them

MetaTrader 4 ships with a full set of native keyboard shortcuts, and the list on this page is built line by line from the platform's own user guide, press F1 inside MT4 and you are reading the same source. The set has been stable across MT4 builds for years; the only catch is that a few keys are context-dependent, F6 and F7 do nothing unless an Expert Advisor is attached to the chart. Start with the keys that move you around a chart, they are the ones you will press hundreds of times a week.

Keys	What they do
← / →	Pan the chart back / forward through history
↑ / ↓	Fast pan back / forward; with a fixed price scale they shift the chart up and down instead
Page Up / Page Down	Pan a whole screen back / forward
Home / End	Jump to the oldest loaded bars / snap back to the current bar
+ / -	Zoom in / zoom out
F12	Step the chart forward one bar at a time
Shift+F12	Step the chart back one bar
5 (numeric keypad)	Reset the vertical scale after you have dragged it out of shape

F12 is the one most traders never find. Press Home to jump to the start of your data, then walk price forward one candle per press, a simple way to practise reading structure without the right edge of the chart giving the move away.

Chart display and drawing-object shortcuts

These change what the active chart shows. Every one of them acts on the chart that currently has focus, so click the chart first if a key seems dead.

Keys	What they do
Alt+1 / Alt+2 / Alt+3	Bar chart / candlesticks / line chart
Ctrl+G	Grid on or off
Ctrl+Y	Period separators on or off
Ctrl+L	Volumes on or off
Ctrl+H	OHLC line on or off
Ctrl+F	Crosshair mode
F8	Chart properties window
F11	Full-screen mode

Ctrl+F is better than it looks: with the crosshair active, click and drag and MT4 shows the distance between the two points in bars and points alongside the price level, a built-in measuring tool most people never touch.

Drawing objects get their own small group:

• Delete removes every selected object.
• Backspace removes the most recently drawn objects, one press at a time, no selecting needed.
• Ctrl+Z (or Alt+Backspace) undoes an object deletion.
• Ctrl+A resets all indicator subwindow heights to their defaults.
• Esc closes whatever dialog is open.

Panel, window and profile shortcuts

Every major MT4 panel toggles from the keyboard. On a laptop screen this group earns its keep fast, two presses of Ctrl+M buys the chart room back from the Market Watch whenever you need it.

Keys	What they do
Ctrl+M	Market Watch panel
Ctrl+N	Navigator panel
Ctrl+T	Terminal panel (trades, account history, alerts, journal)
Ctrl+D	Data Window
Ctrl+I	Indicators List for the active chart
Ctrl+B	Objects List for the active chart
Ctrl+O	Options window
Ctrl+R	Strategy Tester panel
F10	Pop-up prices window
Alt+W	Chart window list
Ctrl+F6	Switch to the next chart window
Ctrl+F5 / Shift+F5	Next / previous profile

The profile pair deserves a mention. A profile saves your whole chart layout, every chart, timeframe, indicator and template, so Ctrl+F5 and Shift+F5 flip between, say, a multi-pair scanning layout and a single-chart execution layout in one press. Ctrl+F6 does the small version of the same job, cycling focus through the charts inside the current layout, which matters more than it sounds because nearly every shortcut on this page applies to whichever chart holds focus.

Trading and tool shortcuts: F9, Ctrl+F9 and the keys around them

This is the group most shortcut lists skip, the keys that touch orders, the tester and the editor.

Keys	What they do
F9	New Order window
Ctrl+F9	Moves keyboard focus into the Terminal's Trade tab
Ctrl+E	Enable or disable Expert Advisors, globally
F4	Open MetaEditor
F6	Strategy Tester for the EA attached to the chart
F7	Properties of the attached EA
F2	History Center
F3	Global Variables
F1	Built-in user guide
Ctrl+S	Save the chart's data as CSV, PRN or HTM
Ctrl+P	Print the chart
Ctrl+W / Ctrl+F4	Close the chart window
Alt+A	Copy Strategy Tester results to the clipboard
Alt+F4	Close MetaTrader 4

Keyboard trading in MT4 is really a two-key story. F9 opens the order ticket, and the ticket is keyboard-navigable: Tab moves between volume, stop loss, take profit and the order buttons, and Enter presses whichever button is highlighted. Ctrl+F9 is the other half, it drops focus straight into the Trade tab so you can arrow through open positions and pending orders and act on them without the mouse. Be clear about what this is, though: keyboard access to the normal trade dialogs, not one-touch execution. MT4 has no native key that closes a position outright.

One warning on Ctrl+E: it is the global Expert Advisors switch, the same as the AutoTrading button. Useful when you mean it, ugly when you brush it by accident while an EA is managing a live position.

The Enter key: MT4's typed fast-navigation commands

Press Enter while a chart has focus and a small input box opens in the chart's bottom-left corner, double-clicking that corner opens it too. This is MT4's fast-navigation box, and it accepts typed commands that almost nobody knows exist:

• M15 — switch the active chart to the 15-minute timeframe; every period code works (M1, M5, M15, M30, H1, H4, D1, W1, MN)
• GBPUSD — switch the chart to another symbol
• GBPUSD, H4 — switch symbol and timeframe in one command
• 2024.02.16 — jump the chart to a date
• 08:30 — jump to a time of day
• 2024.02.16 08:30 — jump to an exact bar

So MT4 does have a keyboard route to timeframes and symbols, it is just a long one: switching to M15 is Enter, M, 1, 5, Enter, five keystrokes per change. If you switch periods a handful of times a day, that is fine. If you switch dozens of times an hour, it adds up, and that is exactly the gap the free Switch Timeframes by Keys utility closes: press 1 through 9 to jump straight to M1 through MN, or cycle a list you define with Z and X, every key remappable, with an optional mode that switches all open charts at once. To be straight about what it is: an upgrade on the native typed command, not a fix for a missing feature, and it only fires while the chart it is attached to has focus. Installing it takes the same minute as any indicator, the install guide walks through it.

Define a hot key: the Navigator's build-your-own shortcuts

The last piece of native keyboard support hides in the Navigator panel (Ctrl+N). Right-click any custom indicator, script or Expert Advisor in it and choose Set hotkey, and MT4 lets you assign a key combination that applies that element to the active chart from then on. Traders mostly use this for scripts, a one-press script beats digging through the Navigator every time, but it works for indicators and EAs the same way.

Two honest caveats before you bind everything in sight:

• Your hotkeys outrank the native ones. Assign Ctrl+O to an indicator and the Options shortcut stops working on that terminal until you remove the binding. Pick combinations the tables above do not already use.
• It only launches Navigator items. You cannot rebind platform actions with it, no remapping timeframe switches, chart closing or order keys. For single-key timeframes, the hotkey utility above is the practical route, because it listens for keys itself rather than asking MT4 to rebind anything.

And if an indicator you have just hotkeyed never appears on the chart, the cause is almost always an install problem rather than the hotkey, the not-showing checklist sorts those out in about a minute. More small chart utilities like these live in the chart tools section.

MT4 hotkey questions

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