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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I was surprised that many people didn’t know this magical ✨ shortcut
Ctrl + Shift + t Cmd + Shift + tIf 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 + tEnd > shift+home will let you copy lines outside of IDE
Ctrl + CCtrl + VLearn 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
That’s so cool/clever.
Ctrl+Shift+Reset returns your document to the last saved state.
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.
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 :>
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.
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.
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.
Using the arrow keys for exactly what they’re made for isn’t a hack lol
Nobody tell OP about the Page Up and Page Down keys, their head might literally explode. (jk op).
True. But also if you are going to use arrow keys to navigate you will want to also know where your scroll lock key is because it’s almost useless unless you use arrow key navigation
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.
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.
