What computer life hacks are your most used?

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.

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

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.

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.

Insult and threaten the maschine till it works

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 !$

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.

Windows+L every time I leave my desk.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

(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

First thing required on every new keyboard

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.

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

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.

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

Ctrl + C Ctrl + V

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

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.

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

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

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

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

• 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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not sure if this has been said already, but win + m collapses all open windows.

I'm a web dev and one "hack" I use all the time is bookmarklets. In Chrome @bookmarks let's you search your bookmarks, so I use this to fire off different scripts to do different things. Most are for debugging and the like. I have my hotkeys setup where ctrl + q puts focus on the omnibar so I can start typing, and then I use @books marks to search for whatever I need. A lot of the bookmarklets just append the current url to some other site like page speed insights or pure.md. I find this saves me a ton of time. Also the duplicate this tab hotkey, I use that all day every day.

Shift + del: skips the trash and actually deletes things

1. Shift + Tab (also works on Linux)

2. If you have a mouse with side buttons, you can use the side buttons to go back or go to the next page on browsers

3. Pressing Alt + F4 on the desktop opens up a dialog asking if you want to shut down, restart, log out, etc. (I think this works on Linux as well)

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

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.

Ctl shift t - reopen last closed tab in tour browser

hosts file block twitter/reddit/facebook/etc on all my computers. i guess i haven't done it on my phone because i can't be bothered [and regardless of how much i need a hit, i'm not gonna sit there on my phone browser for hours anyway]

Not too sure if you can do this in windows, but I've enjoyed mapping alt+tab and alt+shift+tab to windows+mouse scroll

Linux Mint stand-in for Ctrl+Alt+Del on Windows, for when you can't open system monitor:

Get an interactive top you like > When PC freezes go to tty, open top, works like a task manager

I’ll have to upload it here when I get back into work on Tuesday, but I wrote a PDF guide for the most common Windows and Mac shortcuts that I consider to be the essentials.

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.

On Windows you can open up a WSL shell or PowerShell session directly to the folder path you want.

Hold 'Shift' then right click anywhere inside of a directory and you will get an option to "Open PowerShell window here" as well as to "Open Linux shell here".

Turn it off when you're not using it. Save on energy.

Cutting and pasting a folder is faster than copying and pasting.
OS just gotta add an inode in first case.

Not most used, but I recently discovered a lot of new options in COSMIC's launcher, and I use them all the time.

Just type ? and you'll see what I mean.

Notepad++
Ctrl click to place to type the same things once on those spots.
Ctrl and alt together will allow vertical highlights so if you have to modify the middle of several lines.
Edit menu -> line operations to sort by several pre determined methods.

Use a tiling window manager like sway.

Get some big HDDs and self host your own file storage on zfs. Same for media servers like jellyfin. You can also host qBitTorrent web client so it's accessible from anywhere.

Set up a VM in Hetzner cloud and host vaultwarden.

Expose your services over wireguard.

My computer gets hacked all the time, I'm pretty used to it now.

In a browser I right click on a bookmark folder to open all the bookmarks in separate tabs. I usually do this with my social sites.

To update Fedora "sudo dnf upgrade". I used to use the software store but that often requires a reboot.

Windows+L to lock the computer.

I always have my vpn, terminal window, and qbittorrent start at boot.

Dunno if Emacs Lisp counts as a life hack, but I've been slowly learning it, and it's very nice to be able to setup custom workflows with such a high degree of customization (and a substantial amount of flycheck yelling at me)