Button Shortcuts on a Xiaomi, How to Assign Tasks to Them

Smartphones have always been characterized by their large touch screens, that was precisely the great novelty that they offered us compared to traditional phones with a physical keyboard. But as you know, physical buttons remain, mostly three, in the case of Xiaomi phones as well. But you can do a lot with them, thanks to the shortcuts that Xiaomi allows us to do with MIUI.

Some buttons that can give a lot of play with all the possible combinations that the Xiaomi software layer offers us. In this way we can use them to more quickly access different features of the phone that we are going to know below.

Use the buttons of your Xiaomi

As we say, the physical buttons of our mobiles are normally three, the two for volume and the one for on or off, depending on their use. There are some phones that have a fourth button, dedicated to the Google assistant, but that is not the case with Xiaomi phones, which mostly have those three buttons . There are also some phones, the least, that have a dedicated physical button for the camera shutter. Be that as it may, the normal thing is that your phone has three physical buttons, although some Xiaomi models also have three additional capacitive buttons , although these are more veteran models and with some years on top, but their use is still being contemplated. And the good news is that you don’t have to use them just for what they were initially designed for, for volume or turning the terminal on and off, but thanks to the software you can easily program what we can do with them by pressing them.

móviles xiaomi gestos navegación

And it is that MIUI offers us dozens of button combinations that we can use to do different actions within the phone. These are known as button shortcuts, which allow us to configure access to necessary actions such as taking photos with the camera, screenshots or yes, invoking the Google assistant. All this can be done in a simple way as you will be able to see below. Some actions with which you will be able to execute many functionalities of your phone without having to think about entering the terminal in its different menus. Best of all, with these shortcuts on many occasions you will be able to execute actions from the lock screen, without precisely having to unlock it.

Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra Europa

How to access all these shortcuts

In order to use these shortcuts, we must first configure them to our liking, something we can do from the settings of our Xiaomi phone. For this, all we have to do is the following:

  • Enter the settings of your Xiaomi phone
  • Click on “Additional settings”
  • Select “Button Shortcuts”

botones Xiaomi

Within this menu we can access the different actions that the phone can do according to 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 button combinations that we can choose from are the following:

  • Double press the power button
  • Press and hold the power button
  • Press and hold the menu button
  • Press and hold the back button
  • Press the power button plus the start button simultaneously
  • Press the power button plus the menu button simultaneously
  • Press the power button plus the back button simultaneously

botones Xiaomi

As you can see, depending on your phone, there will be more or less button combinations 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 ones , which are normally found at the bottom of the screen. Therefore we have up to seven button combinations that we can assign to each action that we can easily perform with the phone, without having to enter even the functions of each menu that we want to use, shortening the times as good shortcuts that they are.

botones Xiaomi

What actions can we assign to these combinations?

MIUI not only offers us a good number of button combinations to be able to execute the different actions on the phone, but also a large number of actions that can be combined with each other.

botones Xiaomi

All the actions that we have at our disposal are these:

  • Run camera : with it, when we make the combination chosen among all those 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 whole name of this action already tells us, with the selected combination of buttons we can capture the phone’s screen in any of its situations or menus, and then share the images.
  • Start Google Assistant : in this way we will have a fast way to ask this Google assistant for something, regardless of where we are on the phone we can give orders to the assistant.

botones Xiaomi

  • Disable screen : another good alternative to put the phone in a kind of suspense state, in which the screen turns off, but some processes continue 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 a simple to use 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 freeing all possible memory that was being used during its use, to divert it to other more necessary tasks.
  • Activate split screen : with this gesture we can divide the screen of our Xiaomi into several portions, in such a way that it will be very easy to share two different apps on the same screen, only one gesture will be enough to do so.
  • Show menu : as its name says, this function allows us to access the phone’s menu regardless of where we are in the terminal, in the simplest way.