Insult and threaten the maschine till it works
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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End > shift+home will let you copy lines outside of IDE
Ctrl + C
Ctrl + V
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
Ctrl+Shift+Reset returns your document to the last saved state.
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.
Piracy is like an Eye of Sauron thing. You don't get big and ubiquitous like Napster back in the day or you get pounced on like Aragorn clanging his pots and pans. You wanna stay small and quiet undermining the very power they desire like Sam and Frodo :>
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody tell this man about vim
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.
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.
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
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.
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