What is a simple tech tip that changed how you use your computer or other devices in a significant way?

An absolutely huge one for me that seems to work on multiple OS's (Linux + Win at least):

Hold Alt when trying to select text with your mouse. It allows you to more easily select text that is part of a link or otherwise styled in a way that is difficult to select easily (you can click directly in the middle of a link and drag to select text just as if it was NOT a link- it prevents the link from being clicked or dragged itself).

It doesn't work on absolutely everything (some things that look like links but are buttons, etc) but it has saved me so many frustrations

Control + Shift + Esc opens the Task Manager without needing to use Ctrl Alt Del. Surprised how many folks don't know this.

I think e-readers are quite revolutionary for reading. It's not as much the e-ink display, although it's nice, but more having a space without the usual online distractions.

Add these extensions to your browser: uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and NoScript

NoScipt does take a bit of work while you white list sites, but together those three take care of most trackers, ads, popups, etc. unless you decide to allow them.

PowerToys on Windows should be preinstalled. Hotkey OCR, FancyZones, PowerRename, hotkey remapping, more previews... and that's like 10% of the features.

Also, Everything by Voidtools. Possibly combined with EverythingToolbar. Fastest search tool around. I have it mapped to alt+space, so it's almost like a single key access to, well, everything.

ninite.com is the first place I head to on a fresh install of Windows. It bundles software of your choice into one installer and downloads it one go. It also strips out any additional extras such as trial versions of anti-virus software that you don't want nor need.

In Bash: Learning about !$. (Substitutes the last argument of the previous command.)

There lots of other cool shortcuts in Bash, but this is the first one I learned and I think my most used.
And it made me actively look for more, starting my journey towards becoming the Linux witch I am today.

The three biggest game changers for me were:

Middle mouse click on web links, and on tabs in most browsers. Middle mouse click the links to open in new tabs, but on the tabs it closes them without having to open them first. Very useful if I want to close a tab without forcing my browser to reload the contents.

Windows 10 with the Snip & Sketch tool, hit Win Key + Shift + S to bring up the snipping tool to take custom screenshots. On Mac (works for sure on macOS 15+ and maybe others) use Command + Shift + 5 for a similar tool that Snip & Sketch was possibly inspired by. On Linux you’d need to install something like Spectacle, and custom assign the keyboard shortcut to something useful.

On macOS the spotlight bar. Command + Spacebar. So strong is the impulse that my Linux machine has its search bar tied to that shortcut as well. On Windows it’s Win Key + S.

I use those daily and so automatically I had to think hard to figure out that they’re not how I have always used the computer.

Apologies if anything here is misspelled, my phone thinks it’s the boss of me and that it can spell better than I can. Usually it’s right, but it’s a shite guesser.

Syncthing + keepassxc changed how I mange files and passwords.

Good old Ctrl Z for bailing out of many mistakes.

It undoes the last thing you did.

At some point it clicked for me that the best setup is to create 10 virtual desktops (works on all three major OSes and pretty much every Linux DE) and assign each one a numeric keyboard shortcut. After that, you give each one a dedicated function- e.g. Alt+1 is always going to get a text editor, Alt+2 always gets a web browser, Alt+3 always gets a music player, etc.

Feels great to always know exactly where everything is, and no more need to ever Alt-tab through programs again.

Windows + D will take you back to your desktop and minimize all windows. Good if you've got a pesky game that won't let you click away for some reason.

Also, you can navigate the task manager with the arrow keys and hit delete to end a program. More than once I've used the alt tab preview window and the arrow keys to kill particularly meddlesome programs that go full screen.

Also, in Firefox, Ctrl + W to kill a tab, Ctrl + T for a new tab and Ctrl + Shift + T to reopen the last closed tab.

Adding the vimium browser extension. Makes navigating every webpage with scrolling, searching and "clicking" links using vim-like shortcuts. Mostly aimed at vim users, but I think it can be used by everyone who is interested in using the mouse less. Simply press f will create little highlights of all links on the page and then you can type the 2-3 letters for that specific link or button you want to press. Super effective.

Last year I decided that the only online stuff I would do on my mobile was note taking. Saves me a lot of wasted time.

Take regular breaks. Ideally have one day a week where you don't use your computer/phone at all.

Basic hotkey text stuff:
Ctrl + left/right will navigate text faster by jumping to the end/beginning of a word. Up/Down can be used to jump to the start/end of a line (sometimes).
Home/End for jumping to the beginning/end of a line (this is easier on keyboards that have them in useful to reach areas).
Ctrl + Home/End to jump to the beginning/end of a file.
Hold shift while doing these to quickly select blocks of text.
Ctrl + Backspace/Delete to delete an entire word at a time rather than character by character.

Other Stuff:
Windows + TAB is like alt + Tab but often better. Lets you very quickly see all your open windows, some history, and manage multiple desktops (something I should also use more).
Windows + Up/down/left/right to move windows around the screen and quickly get them in the positions you need.

PowerToys:
Pretty much everyone should at least look into this . It's a microsoft package of useful tools that don't come with Windows by default. It's still being developed so there's the occasional hiccup, but at the bare minimum Power Rename and FancyZones are powerful.

Keyboard manager is also quite useful for mapping the capslock key to control (you can put caps lock on the old control or somewhere else if you really think you need it).

Note if you find yourself liking the idea of powertoys run but hate that it's horribly unperformant I recommend looking into Flow Launcher or Fluent Search.

Try out Windows' hidden God Mode feature.

Create an empty folder on your Windows desktop, and rename it as follows:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Now open the folder, and forget that shoddy 'control panel' even exists.

if you use the terminal in Linux (or OS X or Windows Subsystem for Linux) I recommend installing fish and making it your default shell with chsh -s

a killer feature fish has is that it's friendly and usable out-of-the-box, with no customization required. the other custom shell that a lot of people like is zsh, but generally the first thing you do with zsh is install oh-my-zsh, which is a sort of package manager specifically for your shell configuration, and then install various plugins people have written. if this appeals to you then by all means have at it, but if you want your shell to be usable without having to do a bunch of customization and installing plugins, fish is perfect.

if you've ever tried to do simple customization in bash, you'll probably be blown away by how user-friendly fish is. for example, want colors in your prompt?

in bash, for example:

export PS1="\[\e[32m\][\[\e[m\]\[\e[31m\]\u\[\e[m\]\[\e[33m\]@\[\e[m\]\[\e[32m\]\h\[\e[m\]:\[\e[36m\]\w\[\e[m\]\[\e[32m\]]\[\e[m\]\[\e[32;47m\]\\$\[\e[m\] "

meanwhile, in fish:

function fish_prompt
    set_color purple
    date "+%m/%d/%y"
    set_color F00
    echo (pwd) '>' (set_color normal)
end

(this is a bit apples-to-oranges, because the prompts don't show the same thing, but it gives you a taste for how much more pleasant fish can be to work with)

I would say homebrewfor MacOS. What a delight.

macOS text navigation key shortcuts, which are available in practically every text field in every app (aside from a few oddballs like Blender), as listed here.

They're good with standard keyboards, but even better when combined with HHKB/Tsangan layout keyboards. You can get about anywhere in any text editor while barely moving your hands from the home row.

In a terminal on Mac you can access the system clipboard with pbcopy, which I find to be very convenient. For example, to copy the contents of a file to the clipboard to you can run

pbcopy < example.txt

Or you can capture the output of a command, like

tail -n 10 example.txt | pbcopy

to just take the last 10 lines of a file. I find this particularly useful as you can paste from the system clipboard into a ssh terminal. Sometimes its easier to do this rather than sftp a file to a remote host, especially if you already have a ssh tunnel open.

For the Linux users, setting up a ZRAM swap is a great first-level swap. It uses a portion of your RAM to compress pages., which is typically faster to recover from than even NVME swaps on a modern CPU. Even better for stuff like Pis where RAM is premium and SD cards are extra slow.

Especially the way I use Firefox, I've found this immensely helpful.

Everything by voidtools stays on my taskbar right next to windows search. it searches all of your drives instantly for any type of file or folder name that matches your input text. super useful since windows search is absolutely abhorrent, even after removing telemetry and whatnot.

SuperF4 by Stefan Sundin to truly alt F4 in current decade by ctrl+alt+F4. perfect for software that wont let you normally alt F4 for whatever reason. super lightweight and no/low impact on startup.

Lightshot as others have mentioned is worth another mention. also super lightweight.

wiztree deserves an honorable mention for storage management and visualization.

More of a psychological/philosophical thing - if it's not shipped as an obfuscated binary, then its open source, and free to be hacked on for your personal use.

This stretches the concept of "open source" and enters, obviously, possibly unethical hacking territory but opened my eyes to what I feel comfortable using.

Windows: Ctrl + Shift + click shortcut on taskbar to Run as Admin

Steam: this is familiar to anyone who tinkered with Proton, but %COMMAND% represents the default game executable that gets launched by Steam. So if you want to run a loader beforehand, you can set the launch options to something like this (as an example, to enable the Starfield Script Extender)

"E:\games\steam\steamapps\common\Starfield\sfse_loader.exe" -- %COMMAND%

Kubernetes: pods backed by a controller have a randomly generated suffix. If you don't need to be specific in connecting to my-app-124abc or my-app-xyz134 then you can use the controller:

kubectl exec -it deploy/my-app -- bash

Same with port forward, you can do it against the service:

kubectl port-forward service/my-app 8080:8080

Other: Making aliases for things you repeatedly type, saves a few seconds of typing but it still adds up. It's platform and tool-specific, so my gitconfig for example has aliases like

# compact log
l = log --oneline -n 10 --graph --abbrev-commit

# compare and undo against last commit
dh = diff HEAD~1 HEAD
undo = !git reset HEAD~1 --mixed

# Hard and extra-hard resets
reh = reset --hard
rehh = "!r() { git reset --hard origin/$1; }; r"

Being able to tile windows just by moving them to the edge of the screen (Linux Mint21.1 with the Cinnamon5.6.6 desktop).

I can have the PDF of a text book or an instruction video on one side and an open Google Docs on the other side to take notes. A LOT nicer ( and with more advantages ) then studying in the old days with a text book and loose leaf paper laying flat on my desk.

On Youtube, Shift + > speeds up a video (and Shift + < will slow it back down). With a little practice it becomes easy to follow along with many videos at 2x speed. A UCLA study shows that information retention can stay high even at high playback speeds. This can save an incredible amount of time. I like it so much that I've installed a browser plugin to be able to watch videos at speeds beyond 2x.

Having a clipboard manager (there's lots of them out there - but Alfred for Mac is great, and as others have mentioned Windows has one that's built in that needs to be enabled) is a game changer.

Option+Command+Escape on Mac opens the force-quit window for all apps (including if you need to reset finder for some reason). Rarely needed, but a life-safer when you do.

Less of a specific tech tip and more of a best-practices kind of thing: learn the most common keyboard shortcuts for every program you use daily!

Keeping this in mind and taking the time to learn has made using programs a lot quicker and smoother. After a while, you start to realize that similar programs tend to use the same hotkeys for the same or similar functionality and that makes having to use other software a lot easier and smoother.

Just not having to navigate menus looking for a something is a godsend.

Incidentally, if the program you're using has a menu search feature, learn the hotkey to bring it up even if you don't learn any other. This is especially good for big programs like editors.

This is more one for a work environment for those doing a lot of data entry and processing;

I bound ctrl+c, ctrl+v and Enter as mouse macros on my mouse side buttons and it has made my workflow so much easier. Navigating excel, copying and searching text, editing forms etc.

I can copy text, paste it and then hit enter all with one hand and it just flows so much better.

Holding in Ctrl allows you to scroll side to side without one of those fancy mice that can scroll side to side

Edit: Holding in *Shift

Mouse gestures are neat for web browsing, people should try it.

I use Gesturefy with the following mapping:

← : previous
→: next
↑: new tab
↓: close tab
< : previous tab
> : next tab
^ : go to top
v : go to bottom

Not so much software related, but if you have a 2-in-1 tablet or laptop that you use a stylus with a lot, buy a bluetooth keyboard (ThinkPad bluetooth keyboard with the clit mouse is awesome, there are other off brand keyboards that have built in touch pads too), and ditch the detachable keyboard.

This lets you leave the tablet at a reasonable writing/drawing angle, but still gives you easy access to a keyboard rather than having to constantly adjust the stand angle between typing and drawing positions.

If you learn to control the mouse with your off hand, you can write with your dominant hand, while using keyboard short cuts and the keyboard mouse to screenshot, copy/paste, and annotate much more quickly.

I use this setup daily with OneNote to annotate diagrams, create reference pages for projects I am working on like drone pinouts before soldering, reference images/drawings for 3D models in Blender, and layout game mechanic/scripting ideas in Unity.

I am really hoping the Asus and Lenovo folding Windows tablets take off (and decrease in price), because I believe this is an incredibly powerful portable setup for artists, designers, engineers, students, and teachers. Basically anyone who needs to write/sketch and markup images and type can benefit from this.

On Windows, I use Deskpins to force a window to remain topmost, even when it's not active.

(For browsers) Ctrl-1 through 8 go to tabs 1 to 8, and ctrl-9 goes to the last tab in the window. Ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab go forwards and backwards one tab

I'm mostly seeing browser and Windows or Linux, so here's a couple tricks for Mac!

I said this in a comment to someone else, but I'll reiterate it here: Mac has a neat feature called Scroll to Zoom. You hold the command button and scroll, and the screen zooms in on the cursor. Much more controlled than just zooming in text, and it doesn't change anything on the page since it's basically a magnifying glass. Looks like you need to enable it in your settings, but it's great!

Another one I use surprisingly often is the keyboard shortcut to invert colors. Looking it up, you also need to enable this one in Keyboard under accessibility and the shortcut is Control + Option + Command + 8, but I changed it on mine to just be Command + , (comma) since it's more convenient. It's good when I'm browsing sites late at night that don't have a dark mode, or have a dark mode I don't like too much. Heck, I'm using the Love Dark theme on here because it reminds me of how DeviantArt looked inverted years and years ago.

One more: sometimes, highlighting images can make some details clearer. I don't have any specific examples I can give, but it's usually helpful with "dark on dark" type details, if you get what I mean. I think the highlight is applied in a "screen"/overlay fashion, which does surprisingly help.

Cmd tab to cycle through open applications.

I think it's alt tab on windows.

Use PowerShell everywhere. I have two work machines, my Windows machine it is natural to use PowerShell out of the box, but make sure to install 7+ since 5 is what ships in Windows. It is also my default shell for my Mac. Aside from some custom tweaks, I am able to use most of my profile on Windows directly on my Mac, including my Oh-My-Posh prompt. Lastly in my Windows Subsystem for Linux Debian installation, PowerShell is also my default shell there. Being able to use the same shell across all my devices, with a shell which is a programming language in its own right, I can tackle most tasks which might take more effort to program and I can do so without concentrating as much about what system I'm using at the time.

Fish shell as already mentioned.

The most used by me is disabling caps lock and make it work as Ctrl. Caps lock is useless.

Bonus tip: install keyd (Linux) and make caps lock work as Ctrl when holding and ESC when pressed.

Hmm, probably to run vimtutor.

Less simple but gamechanging was using AutoHotkey on Windows. I have a few very simple scripts set up for a bunch of things:

• text expansion (useful if you need to send templated message responses)
• stripping the formatting from formatted text (like if you are copying something from a website into Microsoft Word)
• custom shortcut keys (I have one set up specifically for my browsers where ctrl-shift enter adds www and .net to a Url in the url bar

The possibilities are literally endless, and the scripting is pretty straightforward.

Setting up a windows computer on my Mac via BootCamp. All I have to do is restart the computer and hold alt to switch between OS's. Now I can play PC games and port all my minecraft java packs to bedrock!

The compose key in X11. This lets you enter characters that are not on the keyboard using character sequences. For example, to type Ä, I type my compose key (right alt) followed by " followed by A. The US English layout works best for me because of the curly/square brackets and semicolon are where my native layout puts åäö, so having these characters easily and intuitively available by other means is great.

This is also possible with Windows using WinCompose.

For Mac OS:

Command+ the minus or plus symbol will increase or decrease size of text on almost everything.

At work I caught one of the old guard using a magnifying glass to read a computer screen. It was rather adorable to be honest but still a facepalm moment.

Does Windows have a similar shortcut?