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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Double clicking with the mouse on a word usually selects the whole word with the space after, very nice for copy-pasting.
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Double clicking on the selected word will sometimes select the whole line(In some applications it actually selects up to the newline marker, so it will grab multiple lines if resized smaller).
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Ok, windows “hacks” I use at work.
There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.
Useful for multilinguals out there. Windows (and some linux distros) have an option to bind keyboard layout selection to open windows, meaning alt+tab’ing no longer requires switching between languages.
EDIT:
A phone thing. Some keyboards have whitespace and backspace drag functionality, that allows to move the cursor or highlight and delete text without blocking your view with your fat fingrers.ANOTHER EDIT:
Having a mouse with at least two thumb buttons is a god send. Moving backwards and forwards between application pages is very useful.Also, for devs. Go through you IDE shortcut settings and configure (ctrl|shift|alt)+click shortcuts. Having mouse controls to navigate between declarations, usages and implementations of different code elements with intention is awesome.
In the same vein: ctrl+(f|r) and ctrl+shift+(f|r) for find or replace in file or whole project respectively is really common use case.
Have multicarret shortcuts that allow edits in multiple lines at once. Don’t forget to add shortcuts like alt+(up|down) to move selected lines up and down.
Configure shortcuts for code folding like ctrl+numpad+ and ctlr+numpad- to expand and hide current block or combine with shift to manipulate the whole file.
And for gods sake use home and end keys, combined with ctrl and shift it allows for efficient navigation and selection within a file. Combine it with multicarret support and ctrl+side_arrow_keys and you have a way to sync multiple carrets and efficiently edit multiple lines.Finnaly: f1 – help, f2 – rename, f5 – refresh / run, optionally with ctrl, f11 – fullscreen, f12 – devtools.
There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.
Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.
From my experience win+shift+s take a screen shot of all the screens. Print screen opens this small snipping tool widget at the top that gives me more control. Now the behavior might have changed since I’ve found it, windows 11 wasn’t a thing back then and snipping tool got some updates in recent years.
I used it on w10 for the snipping tool and it still works on w11.
My grub boot loader is pretty hacked together at this point. Really should probably do a fresh install at some point. Want to get a 4TB SSD at some point though.
Windows+L every time I leave my desk.
That’s not even a life hack. That’s literally policy, at least where I work at :)
None of these comments are life hacks. When did using a documented feature built into your software become a hack?
Not everyone knows the keyboard shortcut though. I bet you can find people hunting for it using the mouse every time.
At my old job (tech support), I watched a new hire once highlight text, right click for the context menu, and click “copy”. And then right-click to hit “paste”. Every time. They didn’t know a single shortcut for anything. It was maddening to watch.
I gave em a lot of help because they were clearly not particularly tech savvy, but it made me wonder how the hell they got through the interview process with such a limited skillset.
How can people not use shortcuts? If that shortcut wouldn’t exist, I would create it using Autohotkey
⌃⌘Q for those of us on MacBooks
No. What the fuck
And so easy to remember: windows L, sicher und schnell!
and win+x > up up right down enter, every night
With open shell to replace the start menu:
Windows - > right right enter for shutdown.
Wibdows - > right right up up enter for hybernate
Find a Linux distro you like and install it instead of Windows.
Use LibreOffice, not MSOffice
Ditch Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Tech walled gardens are insane asylums. Leave them.
Turn it off when you’re not using it. Save on energy.
Even 50W, 24/7, is 36 kWh/month. $3 where I live; $12 in CA.
Modern computers don’t use much energy when they sleep.
If they sleep
Custom autocompletes/corrects. Just figure out a non-word (i.e. something that you wouldn’t want to use without autocorrecting) that’s easy to remember and set it up frequently used snippets of text. Some examples:
- meetnow - my zoom meeting link
- booktime - a link to my calendly
- frequent sentences or blurbs I use in emails (e.g. thanks so much, let me know if i can help with anything else sorta stuff)
- nicknames for different frequently used hex codes
- galert/yalert/redalert populate a styled HTML snippet to make a green, yellow, or red div that I can then just pop my content into
- lots of other little HTML snippets like that
- group nicknames to populate a list of email addresses (like an Outlook contacts group but you can use it outside of Outlook)
Anyway there are a ton of things I use it for, those are just a few examples. Saves me a lot of time.
You can do this on Macs at a system level, on Windows you can do it on some programs but it seems to have to be set up on each one which is worthless.
That’s so smart!
I set up autocompletes for my phone number (and a few other personal links) but these are amazing… thanks for sharing
On Windows you can open up a WSL shell or PowerShell session directly to the folder path you want.
Hold ‘Shift’ then right click anywhere inside of a directory and you will get an option to “Open PowerShell window here” as well as to “Open Linux shell here”.
Oh kid, I do this for over forty years now.
I’m sitting up on the upper balcony tabbing between two two plebs.
I’m kinda mind blown that this is even considered a tip. isn’t this just basic functionality of a text box???
it’s shit like this that makes me think I do know tech a little bit, until i stumble on an actual tech community and feel like I know nothing
For real, I remember when Solitaire was added to Windows to teach people how to use a mouse. It wasn’t just some fun little thing they added on a whim. The goal was to provide an entertaining way for users to naturally learn mouse controls like clicking and dragging.
Before then, you had to use the keyboard to navigate text, because you literally didn’t have a mouse.
Expanding on yours, Shift + Home and Shift + End to select from the cursor to the beginning or end of the line.
And Ctrl + Shift + Arrow Keys to select words/lines. Essential when working with documents.
Edit: Sorry, this has already been thoroughly covered in this thread.
Ctrl + shift + esc brings up the Windows task manager directly instead of the menu you get when you press ctrl + alt + del
Just remember that ctrl+alt+del is a system level interrupt that should always work as long as the kernel is running. Ctrl+shift+esc is not, and won’t work in some situations like being used inside a fullscreen frozen program.
That’s so cool/clever.
when my computer pisses me off i like to smash it
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.
Actually use Home and End keys to get to the start and end of text.
Ctrl + F for searching text. Very useful.
Alt + Tab for window switching.
Linux + USB drive to switch away from Windows.
Combine home and end with ctrl to move to the start or end of the file. As a dev I use this a lot.
I also have keyboard shortcuts for code folding and mouse shortcuts to navigate between usages, declarations and implementations. Onboarding people is a slog when they don’t have the same shortcuts.
I can’t live without my home, end, pagedown and pageup keys
