Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

My favorite windows shortcut is 'Windows+shift+left/right' to move an application between monitors. Very helpful for moving games around or snapping without have to use a mouse.

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.

Recently had to help a relative who still uses windows, so here's a freebie from Linux:

You can use super + number to launch any pinned program on the taskbar. For example let's say you have your browser right of the start button and file explorer on the next spot right, pressing super+1 launches the browser and super+2 the explorer

Edit: super = windows logo key

Win + E to open a file browser window

Control Backspace deletes whole words. Misspelled control? Faster to delete and retype than move my cursor around when I'm on a roll.

when my computer pisses me off i like to smash it

My main one is to learn shortcuts on your most used programs. Using the mouse for everything is a waste of time, but that has been said multiple times.

My second is to create scripts to do a bunch of repetitive tasks. For example, I have a script I run on my work PC after I log on to the VPN that starts my "always on" programs (like notepad++), unlocks the hosts file, etc. I have some sendto scripts for converting files with pandoc, fetching multiple git repos in one go, etc. It just speeds up things and avoids errors versus me doing them manually.

On Windows I use PowerShell and on Linux I use bash, meaning they work without additional software installed.

I've discovered over the years that these 2 commands can fix a lot of problems for a windows computer. And there’s no practical downside unless you're running pirated software or exotic OS mods.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

sfc /scannow

As with any advice online, its critical to research and understand what you're doing. :D

• Double clicking with the mouse on a word usually selects the whole word with the space after, very nice for copy-pasting.

• 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).

Add Home/End buttons into your work flow to jump to the start or end of lines. Works with holding Shift as well.

For me, one of the biggest things was removing all the visual noise from my desktop. Disable notifications, disable or hide unused taskbar elements, and on Windows, get rid of the patently awful ticker thing that lives on the taskbar. Disable window animations.

I did the same thing on my phone, too, including disabling pop-up notifications, toasts, floating bubbles, and animations. My brain is much happier for it.

Shift + del: skips the trash and actually deletes things

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

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.

Pretty much anything has a free alternative. Often times, with a better UI or more features with far less bloat than the top commercial product.

End > shift+home will let you copy lines outside of IDE