Nobody tell this man about vim

To be pedantic, keyboard shortcuts aren’t hacks. That’s the intended use of the thing, and long lists of keybaord shortcuts exist so that people can find the ones that work for them and use them. Just because most people don’t do it doesn’t make it a hack.

My favorite keyboard shortcut is Super/Windows key and spacebar switches keyboard languages. That’s not a hack, though.

Closer to a “hack” is going into an android phone with ADB and disabling bloatware manually.

Using ublock origin picker to remove everything useless. Like, Youtube suggestions, everything but download button on ddl websites, useless footers/headers on news, etc…

I was surprised that many people didn’t know this magical ✨ shortcut

Ctrl + Shift + t
Cmd + Shift + t

If you accidentally closed a tab in a browser, it will reopen it. Most browsers also lets you open closed tabs one after the other.

It is easy to remember to since it is just a shift away from new tab shortcut

Ctrl + t
Cmd + t

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.

Yay, nobody said my favorite hack.

While browsing on the web and you want to “open link into a new tab”, click using the mouse wheel like it’s a regular left or right click.

It’s great for researching.

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.

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.

Insult and threaten the maschine till it works

Learn vim keybindings.

Learn hotkeys for every program you have and learn to navigate between programs without the mouse.

Stop using the computer and go outside sometimes

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.

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.

First thing required on every new keyboard

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.

Expanding on yours, Shift + Home and Shift + End to select from the cursor to the beginning or end of the line.