This is a kind of neat hint; I was totally unaware of the new label button. I'm not sure how much I'd use it... However, I recall once upon a time (and I think this hearkens back to classic Mac OS 9 days) there was a hack to allow you to assign labels to files and folders by keyboard shortcut. That was incredible useful for a keyboarder like me. If I can avoid pointing and clicking a mouse I will!

Theoretically something could be possible like with this hint: 10.5 Show Package Contents Keyboard Shortcut but since the context menu only shows the colored label squares and not the names you can't use that... but maybe with this button visible, since it lists the names it could work?

I tried adding a keyboard shortcut (System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts). Choose the application Finder.app from the popup and enter the name of the colour in the Menu Title field, and choose the shortcut key.

I thought of this and found that it worked satisfactorily for a window once you'd initially clicked the Labels button. And the window has to have the Toolbar visible... so it doesn't work on the Desktop.

It think this had been possible with greater ease and no extra steps required besides assigning and using the keyboard shortcuts before Apple decided to only display colored squares for the labels in the Finder's File menu.

I tried this with no luck. Added a Finder shortcut, Menu Title of "Green" (no quotes), shortcut of Option-2. Clicked on a file in the Finder, no change. Am I overlooking something?