The great thing about having virtual navigation buttons on Android is that they can disappear when you don’t need them to provide you with more screen space. They can also be modified. Using a new tweak called Xtended NavBar, you can turn the standard Android navigation buttons on your rooted device into handy shortcuts and quick settings toggles.

Rather than having just one set of navigation buttons, you can have several with Xtended NavBar. In addition to the regular setup — with home, back, and recent apps — you can have media playback controls; quick settings toggles for things like Wi-Fi, airplane mode, GPS, and Bluetooth; and even shortcuts to your favorite apps.

The latter makes multitasking extremely fast. If you have apps like Gmail, Evernote, and Hangouts in your navigation bar, for instance, you can quickly jump into them from within other apps; you don’t need to hit the recent apps key and search for them, or go back to the home screen.

As demonstrated in the short clip below, you can swipe between each navigation bar just like you would swipe between different home screens:

https://youtu.be/z29pYNmda6k

Xtended NavBar is a free tweak that you can download from the XDA Developers forum by following the source link below. You’ll need a rooted device running Android 4.2.2 and above with the Xposed framework installed. And of course, this only works on devices with on-screen navigation buttons.