Using label shortcuts to search Gmail

If you are a Gmail user, you might already know that there are no folders in Gmails. Instead of folders, you organize them by labels. Even all the built-in views like inbox, sent mail, draft, trash etc are also labels.
Since there are no folders, when we search for a mail, we are actually searching the whole bag of mails. For example, to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you would search for label:inbox label:unread. By combining the built-in labels with the labels you assign, you can create queries that narrow the result. But such queries can become long and hard to write.
Fortunately, you can replace the word label with l. So, the previous query can be shortened to l:inbox l:unread. That definitely saves as a few keystrokes, especially when we write long queries. But can it get any better?
Yes. Gmail has shortcuts for some of the built-in labels which can quicken things further.
Here is a list of shortcuts you could use;
^b – chats
^f – sent mail
^i – inbox
^k – trash
^r – draft
^s – spam
^t – starred messages
^u – unread mail
Using the above shortcuts, our previous query can be further shrunk to l:^i l:^u.
To specifically exclude mails in a label, prefix it with a – (minu) sign. So if we wanted to search for unread messages that aren’t in the inbox, we would use, -l:^i l:^u.

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