Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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.

• 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).

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.

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

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

when my computer pisses me off i like to smash it

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

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

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

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.

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)

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)

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

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 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.

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

Win + E to open a file browser window

Ctl shift t - reopen last closed tab in tour browser