We will tell you the shortcuts that you can configure with your Xiaomi buttons in MIUI below.
Smartphones have always been characterized by their large touch screens, which was precisely the great novelty that they offered us compared to traditional phones with the physical keyboard. But as you know, physical buttons remain, mostly three, in the case of Xiaomi phones too. But you can do a lot with them, thanks to the shortcuts that allow us to make Xiaomi with MIUI.
Buttons can give a lot of play with all the possible combinations offered by the Xiaomi software layer. In this way, we can use them to access more quickly to different features of the phone that we will know below.
Shortcuts that you can configure with your Xiaomi buttons in MIUI
As we say the physical buttons of our phones are usually three, the two-volume buttons and the power on or off, depending on their use. Some phones have a fourth button, dedicated to the Google Assistant, but that is not the case with Xiaomi phones, which have the vast majority with these three buttons. There are also some phones, the fewest, that have a dedicated physical button for the camera shutter. Be that as it may, it is normal for your phone to have three physical buttons, although some Xiaomi models also have three additional capacitive buttons, although these are older models and with some years on them, but their use is still contemplated. And the good news is that you do not have to use them only for what they were initially designed for, for the volume or the on and off of the phone, but thanks to the software you can easily program what we can do with them when we press them.
And is that MIUI offers us dozens of combinations of buttons that we can use to do different actions within the phone. These are known as button shortcuts, which allow us to configure to our liking access to actions as necessary as taking pictures with the camera, screenshots or yes, invoke the Google Assistant. All this can be done simply as you will be able to see below. Some actions with which you will be able to run many features of your phone without having to think about entering the phone in its various menus. Best of all is that with these shortcuts you will often be able to run the actions from the lock screen, without having to unlock it.
How to access all these shortcuts?
To use these shortcuts, you must first configure them to our liking, something we can do from the settings of our Xiaomi phone. To do this all we have to do is the following:
- Enter the settings of your Xiaomi phone.
- Click on “Additional settings”.
- Select “Button shortcuts”.
Within this menu, we can access the different actions that the phone can do depending on the combination of buttons that we press, within each of them we must choose the combination of buttons with which this action will be activated. The combinations of buttons that we can choose are the following:
- Double pressing the power button.
- Press and hold down the power button.
- Press and hold the menu button.
- Press and hold the back button.
- Simultaneous press of the power button plus the home button.
- Press the power button plus the menu button simultaneously.
- Simultaneously press the power button plus the back button.
As you can see depending on your phone there will be more or fewer combinations of buttons to be able to execute the different actions. Because in the MIUI interface it is not only allowed to program the use of the usual physical buttons of the older brand phones, but also the capacitive navigation buttons, which are usually located at the bottom of the screen. Therefore we have up to seven combinations of buttons that we can assign to each action that we can perform with the phone easily, without having to enter up to the own functions of each menu we want to use, shortening the times as good shortcuts that are.
What actions can we assign to these combinations?
MIUI not only offers us a good number of button combinations to be able to execute different actions on the phone but also another large number of actions that can be combined.
All the actions we have at our disposal are these:
- Run camera: When we make the combination chosen from all available, the camera will run instantly, so that from anywhere on the phone, even with it locked, we can quickly open the camera.
- Take a screenshot: the name of this action tells us everything, with the selected combination of buttons we can capture the phone screen in any of its situations or menus, and then share the images.
- Start Google Assistant: in this way we will have a quick way to ask something to this Google assistant, regardless of where we are on the phone we can give orders to the assistant.
- Turn off screen: another good alternative to place the phone in a kind of state of suspense, in which the screen is turned off, but some processes are still running in the background, being able to listen to them while the screen is off.
- Turn on flashlight: this is one of the most popular shortcuts, the one that allows us to start the flashlight and illuminate everything around us. And best of all, if it is simple to use the key combination, we will always have light even in the most hostile situations.
- Close current application: this shortcut allows you to exit the app in which we are currently in the foreground, thus immediately releasing all possible memory that was being used during use, to derive it to other more necessary tasks.
- Activate split-screen: with this gesture, we can divide the screen of our Xiaomi into several portions, so that it will be very easy to share on the same screen two different apps, we only need a gesture to do so.
- Show menu: as its name says, this function allows us to access the phone menu regardless of where we are inside the phone, most simply.
