Ask Lemmy

Nobody tell this man about vim

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

the "fuck" command.

Using the arrow keys for exactly what they’re made for isn’t a hack lol

Insult and threaten the maschine till it works

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.

Are you serious? arrow keys instead of clicking? let's take it further:

shift+arrow highlights letters
ctrl+arrow skips entire words
ctrl+shift+arrow highlights entire words
home/end jumps to start/end of line
ctrl+home/end jumps to start/end of text box
ctrl+shift+home/end jumps to start/end of textbox and highlights it
um, do you need me to explain what ctrl+xcv do? or ctrl+zy? or ctrl+asdwerfgop?

isn't this just basic typing? didnt yall learn this in the 90s??? how are you all on the internet right now

wait til you hear about how i swipe texted all this

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.

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

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.

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.

To navigate to the previous folder

cd -

To reissue the previous command with a prefix. For example:

cat /root/.ssh/authorized_keys # Will fail without privilege

sudo !!

To use the argument of the previous command. For example:

tac ~/.ssh/authorized_keys # oops, misspelled cat

cat !$

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

Windows+L every time I leave my desk.

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.

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.

Microsoft has never fixed the sticky keys replacement cheese to unlock a PC you have physical access to. Ive done it up to W10, never tested it on W11.

1. Get a Windows recovery USB.

2. Boot into the recovery menu and open the command prompt.

3. Navagate to system32 and make a copy of the cmd.exe file (for a backup)

4. Copy the sticky_keys.exe and have it overwrite cmd.exe, then reboot.

5. On the login screen, smash the shift key until the command prompt appears and for some reason (because no user has logged in yet) it has admin permissions, so you can reset local passwords.

6. Once your logged in as a local admin, copy the backup of cmd.exe back so noone is none the wiser (except the security software that knows you messed with something)

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.

Keyboard shortcuts in general.

• Alt + left right (previous/next page in browsers)

• Windows + 1 (2, 3, ...) on Windows and KDE focuses the window at that position in the taskbar

• Alt + Tab to switch windows (hold shift to go backwards)

• Windows + Tab to switch windows within the same application (like, all browser windows if you're in a browser)

• Alt + 1 (2, 3, ...) on Windows/Linux usually selects the corresponding tab

• Ctrl + Tab to cycle through tabs like Alt-Tab does for windows (hold shift to go backwards)

• In most browsers or things with a URL/go to bar, Ctrl+L will focus that. No need to click the address bar, Ctrl+L, example.com, Enter.

• In Discord and Slack, you can press Ctrl+K to open a box to quickly type a channel/DM name to go to it quickly

• If you have them, the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys are actually pretty useful. Press Home instead of scrolling all the way back up.

• F1 is usually help

• F2 is usually rename

• F3 is usually search

Ctrl + shift + esc brings up the Windows task manager directly instead of the menu you get when you press ctrl + alt + del

First thing required on every new keyboard

Vim takes your keyboard shortcuts to the extreme. If you can be bothered to learn it.

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.

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.

Oh kid, I do this for over forty years now.

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.

Find a Linux distro you like and install it instead of Windows.

Use LibreOffice, not MSOffice

Ditch Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Tech walled gardens are insane asylums. Leave them.

Ctrl+r on bash and zsh (possibly others) for quickly recalling anything you've typed before

Actually use Home and End keys to get to the start and end of text.

Ctrl + F for searching text. Very useful.

Alt + Tab for window switching.

Linux + USB drive to switch away from Windows.

(Linux)

Add the same symbol at the beginning of most aliases. I use é

So when I type é+tab I get all my aliases

é+first letters of alias+tab and I'm sure autocomplete will select the alias and not another command

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.

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

Ctrl + C Ctrl + V