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.
You must log in or register to comment.
That’s so cool/clever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody tell this man about vim
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.
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.
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.
With Shift + Pos1 or End you can mark text from cursor until beginning or end of line! I use that often.
So ctrl shift left or right will highlight full words not just the next character. This stops when it hits a space
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
As a basic Linux user, I have a shell script to do all my updating, upgrading, removing of unneeded packages, etcetera. Under no circumstances is it all that advanced, just a string of simple enough apt and flatpak commands.
I also recently figured out that god knows how long ago that I set an alias to run it that’s only 3 keyboard clicks instead of 5, saving basically less than a second. So not that useful, but still good to know… until I inevitably forget about it again.
I’ve been yum-cronning since 2002. You guys still do it manually?
As someone who has only been using Linux for a few years ( >5 ), yeah I do.
Definitely know what cron/cronning is, but I’ll definitely have to look up what yum-cronning is.
Edit:
I’m an idiot and correct in my thinking that yum was referring to the yum package management thing, which I don’t use on my system. Sounds cool, though. Might look into automating my setup, but it’s become such a routine for me to run the script I’m not sure if I could easily switch.
I don’t consider them hacks. They’re tooling and intended use. Even if most people don’t know them. They were designed deliberately.
Using keyboard input is not a clever misuse of unintended functionality. It’s intended design.
I hack websites through browser extensions. Adblocker, css inject, platform extensions. But even that is only hacking in the context of the original content. As a product it’s its intended purpose. So I wouldn’t call it life hack.
Mouse gestures, keyboard key combinations, alt access, alt keypad character input, YouTube Sponsorblock, adblock, search bookmarks are - I guess - my most used.
First thing required on every new keyboard
As a draftsman, CAPS is on more than its off.
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.
