this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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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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[–] Dicska@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Ctrl+Shift+Reset returns your document to the last saved state.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 days ago

if you're concerned about how much you need to move your hand, then you'll probably love (neo)vim

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Set up three WireGuard network interfaces on a VPS then accept traffic from your end devices to route through the three double hop VPN tunnels to a country with better privacy laws. Install an ad and tracking blocking DNS server to block all nefarious hostnames as well as more granular blockers for your browsers.

[–] ElectricWaterfall@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What’s the point of the VPS?

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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Keyboard shortcuts for everything. Mousing to a menu is a waste of time in any app you use daily.

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[–] 0xD@infosec.pub 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

With Shift + Pos1 or End you can mark text from cursor until beginning or end of line! I use that often.

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[–] Randomocity@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] BigPotato@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago

Not a computer hack, but some phone keyboards have backspace and whitespace drag, the former allowing to select a range form the cursor to delete and the latter moving the cursor. Way more usable than trying to fat finger cursor position and selection.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago

when my computer pisses me off i like to smash it

[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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

[–] raltoid@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
  • 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).

[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Ok, windows "hacks" I use at work.

There's a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.

Useful for multilinguals out there. Windows (and some linux distros) have an option to bind keyboard layout selection to open windows, meaning alt+tab'ing no longer requires switching between languages.

EDIT:
A phone thing. Some keyboards have whitespace and backspace drag functionality, that allows to move the cursor or highlight and delete text without blocking your view with your fat fingrers.

ANOTHER EDIT:
Having a mouse with at least two thumb buttons is a god send. Moving backwards and forwards between application pages is very useful.

Also, for devs. Go through you IDE shortcut settings and configure (ctrl|shift|alt)+click shortcuts. Having mouse controls to navigate between declarations, usages and implementations of different code elements with intention is awesome.
In the same vein: ctrl+(f|r) and ctrl+shift+(f|r) for find or replace in file or whole project respectively is really common use case.
Have multicarret shortcuts that allow edits in multiple lines at once. Don't forget to add shortcuts like alt+(up|down) to move selected lines up and down.
Configure shortcuts for code folding like ctrl+numpad+ and ctlr+numpad- to expand and hide current block or combine with shift to manipulate the whole file.
And for gods sake use home and end keys, combined with ctrl and shift it allows for efficient navigation and selection within a file. Combine it with multicarret support and ctrl+side_arrow_keys and you have a way to sync multiple carrets and efficiently edit multiple lines.

Finnaly: f1 – help, f2 – rename, f5 – refresh / run, optionally with ctrl, f11 – fullscreen, f12 – devtools.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago (4 children)

There's a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.

Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.

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[–] pleasestopasking@reddthat.com 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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