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.
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…
Just getting people to switch away from chrome to get ublock origin is a major hack all itself and completely changed the way you use the internet.
Why have I not been doing this?! Just removed the “2 years old” .world banner.
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.
Piracy is like an Eye of Sauron thing. You don’t get big and ubiquitous like Napster back in the day or you get pounced on like Aragorn clanging his pots and pans. You wanna stay small and quiet undermining the very power they desire like Sam and Frodo :>
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.
Showed a coworker that while he was training me.
“OK, right-click on that and…”
<center click>
puzzled
"OK, right-click…
<center click>
Very recently, I have adopted Shift+LMBclick to open a link in a new browser window.
I use this primarily for accessing one link in favorites bar.
I would love to figure out a non-extension way (curse you, draconian IT policy!) to set this behavior in the favorite/bookmark…
Or ctrl-/command-click!
there’s a extension to do this with the right click button instead too
Oh I love this one too, probably one of my most used.
click using the mouse wheel
‘middle click’
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
I do this with the windows button on my gaming rig
Fail. Remap it to escape.
Just remap it to something more useful, Colemak remaps it to backspace.
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.
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