Mine is using the arrow keys to navigate typed text while writing and editing. It helps speed things up, versus having to move your hand to the mouse to navigate.
Use the Up and Down Arrows to move/jump vertically.
Left and Right Arrows to move/jump horizontally.
Combine Left or Right Arrow with Shift to be able to select text. Use Up or Down Arrow with Shift to quickly select whole/nearly whole sections of text.
Combine Control with Left/Right Arrow to jump whole words to more quickly move to where you want to type.
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That’s so cool/clever.
I’m still on Windows, because I’m a lesser human, etc…
That said, PowerToys adds a lot of nice features to Windows (more like…Sindows, amirite), like being able to break your screen into zones, etc…
My biggest computer life hack of all time would probably be: piracy. Highly recommended. Saves you so much money, I’m surprised they don’t advertise it more.
The Escape Key closes most popups, dialogs, modals. It’s also non-destructive, so it won’t close a program; any “save changes” dialog will be cancelled.
What you just described is the most gen-Y always used PCs but never knew dogshit about it thing ive heard.
Regarding that, Wait until you learn you can use strg to move beetween words.
Nobody tell this man about vim
Safe: Use text expansion for trivial yet long texts like your emails, addresses, etc. to almost eliminate errors in those texts. Espanso is something I use on Linux Mint, while macOS supports text expansion natively. I am yet to find something that fills the gap on NetBSD, but I almost exclusively use emacs on those machines, which has native support for snippets.
Unsafe: Remove USB drive without ejecting it. :P
Contrived yet neat: With special software (BetterTouchTool on macOS) or keyboard firmware (QMK and ZMK, which is what I use), one can use Spacebar as a layer key (SpaceFn, as it makes Spacebar behave as a Fn key) to unlock neat shortcuts like navigating using HJKL, add macros, remap hard to reach keys on to the home row, etc. There are other things that can be done such as one-shot modifiers which make typing less straining.
P.S. The snark in the comments here is surprising. Everyone starts somewhere. Let us be welcoming.
Yeah I do a lot of keyboard shortcuts. My computer career started before I even had a mouse, it was all keyboard editing. Doesn’t bother me a bit to leave the mouse just sitting there. In fact after typing a comment here I just tab to the Post button and hit Enter.
I’m a web dev and one “hack” I use all the time is bookmarklets. In Chrome @bookmarks let’s you search your bookmarks, so I use this to fire off different scripts to do different things. Most are for debugging and the like. I have my hotkeys setup where ctrl + q puts focus on the omnibar so I can start typing, and then I use @books marks to search for whatever I need. A lot of the bookmarklets just append the current url to some other site like page speed insights or pure.md. I find this saves me a ton of time. Also the duplicate this tab hotkey, I use that all day every day.
Are you serious? arrow keys instead of clicking? let’s take it further:
shift+arrow highlights letters
ctrl+arrow skips entire words
ctrl+shift+arrow highlights entire words
home/end jumps to start/end of line
ctrl+home/end jumps to start/end of text box
ctrl+shift+home/end jumps to start/end of textbox and highlights it
um, do you need me to explain what ctrl+xcv do? or ctrl+zy? or ctrl+asdwerfgop?isn’t this just basic typing? didnt yall learn this in the 90s??? how are you all on the internet right now
wait til you hear about how i swipe texted all this
They tought us on typewriters in the 90s. Wait until you hear about how I changed an ink ribbon, son.
They taught us on ink pens in the 1700s. Wait until you hear about how I etched on slate tablets.
Works with backspace and delete too!
pro tip: press backspace to delete the last letter you wrot
r delete to delete the next letter
I’m with you but the snark is a bit much
I’m not being snarky, I’m just flabbergasted. because of the platform we’re on. itd be a lot less on a normie platform
Linux. Windows is used for Russian oligarchs.
Since people are expecting windows shortcut keys, I nominate TAB navigation. Hitting tab will cycle the focus through all the buttons and edit boxes. Shift Tab to go backwards.
First thing required on every new keyboard
Just remap it to something more useful, Colemak remaps it to backspace.
Cutting and pasting a folder is faster than copying and pasting.
OS just gotta add an inode in first case.Wait until you learn about vim keybindings. Instead of moving your hand to the arrow keys, you can stay on the homerow and movie up down left right from there.
Far from most used, but very handy: ctrl+win+shift+b
It restarts the graphic subsystem, which can help recover from situations where game crashes or similar cause visual issues.
(Linux)
Add the same symbol at the beginning of most aliases. I use é
So when I type é+tab I get all my aliases
é+first letters of alias+tab and I’m sure autocomplete will select the alias and not another command
