Let's say you want to highlight the text in this sentence. You can very carefully place your cursor before the "L" in "Let's" , and carefully drag it to the "e" in "sentence" . Or, get your cursor anywhere into "Let's", double click and drag down to anywhere in "sentence". It makes grabbing text so much faster and prevents a ton of misclicks where you miss the first letter, for example.

Based on the screen shares I've done most people don't know or do this even though it's much faster and easier than the alternative.

I learned this decades ago, but I still regularly marvel at how useful this feature is to me:

To switch between running applications, hold alt and tap tab to open a quick switcher. Keep holding alt and tapping tab until the application you want is hilighted, then release.

Works everywhere on every computer: Windows, Mac OS and Linux. I must have learned it when I was 16? So I wasted the first 15 years of my life.

On windows using windows+v instead of ctrl+v will give you a history of the last couple of things you copied. Super useful if you need to copy and paste several things over and over.

If you like man you'll love tealdr. Crowdsourced abbreviated man pages.

The CLI is tldr <command>.

For my own answer: KDE windowing rules. You always want your music player to load up in a 200x400 window, on the top left corner of your monitor? KDE has you covered. Want your browser to scoot left when you open a terminal, and then your terminal scoot up when you open another terminal? Yea, you can do that.

Followed closely by KDE letting you remap damn near any hotkey you choose.

Middle-click a link (press in on your scroll wheel) in most any browser on most any operating system to open the link in a new tab. Default behavior in most browsers is to open the tab at the end of whatever the current run of tabs is, in the background.

Middle-click the browser tab itself to close it without having to hunt down the X.

Bypass most paywalls by hard-refreshing the page (CTRL/Command + Shift + R in most browsers but NOT Safari) and immediately running the Print keyboard shortcut (usually CTRL/Command + P), and print to PDF. Usually you can capture the page before whatever arcane Javascript sets in and throws up the paywall.

Linux / macOS Terminal stuff

There is a terminal app you can install called htop that does a good job of telling you all of your running processes and lets you send a KILL signal to them if you ran it in SUDO. But I like btop better than htop.

If you ever open up a terminal sessions and the prompt looks unfamiliar, you can usually type echo $0 and find out what shell environment you're in (like zsh, bash, fish, etc)

If you know you'll need a file of a certain name but you don't have anything to put into the file just yet, but you need to validate its presence for some reason, you can touch filename and you'll create a 0 byte wherever you put the file. So touch ~/.mysecretscripts/testscript would create a file called testscript in a hidden folder called .mysecrescripts in the home directory.

If you're ever lost in the terminal and have no idea what your present working directory is, you can type pwd and it will print your present working directory.

The ls command (LS if you were to capitalize it) has flags that you'll really want to use. Flags like -a to list every element, --color to make it colorize the output, etc. Manpages are useful to see them all.

Do you keep effing up and typing an old school command from DOS that you think should work the way you remember in Linux? Are you typing dir instead of ls? Do you cls instead of clear? Aliases to the rescue! Most *sh (zsh, bash, and fish for sure) include aliases. I can only speak to zsh and fish shells, but in zsh you can edit your ~/.zshrc profile, and add things like alias dir=ls which will run ls if you type in dir. Fish has a dedicated alias command.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Apps I recommend for the terminal:

btop / btop++ - Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes. C++ version and continuation of bashtop and bpytop.

zoxide - A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells. Remembers your directories so you can just cd Projects and it'll remember that's over in your external drive.

tree - Display directories as trees (with optional color/HTML output)

starship - The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

Those are four things that I use on every Linux and macOS and I love them to pieces. A must-install for me.

Oh, and one random one:

Dots don't matter in the user half of a gmail email address. tim.apple@gmail.com is the same as timapple@gmail.com is the same as t.i.m.a.p.p.l.e.@gmail.com

Probably switching all my drives over to btrfs a few years ago.

btrfs is essentially a superpower, as far as I'm concerned. Snapshots and subvolumes make backing up and restoring almost completely painless, even to/from remote backups. Backups in a RAID1 array can self heal, preventing bit rot. Transparent compression means my drives go further than they otherwise would, both in space and endurance. cp --reflink is, for a lot of use cases, a better symlink and a better cp.

Some of these may be well known, but just in case, in most editing applications and windows:

• Ctrl-Left / Ctrl-Right - move a whole word to the left or right
• Ctrl-Home / Ctrl-End - skip to start or end of the document

And most importantly: hold down Shift while tapping any of the other cursor motion keys or combos to start a text selection or change one. Then you can do Ctrl-X or Ctrl-C to cut or copy it, or Ctrl-V to replace it with a paste from the clipboard. Or just start typing to replace the selection with some whole new text.

Oh, and here's a couple of other handy ones:

• On Linux, you can generally do ifconfig to see your machines network address (usually local, right after where it says inet). Then, assuming you have Python installed, you can do python -m http.server 8000 to spin up a little webserver that just serves the contents of the current directory you started it. Go to another machine on your network, point a browser at http://a.b.c.d:8000/ (where a.b.c.d was the address that ifconfig showed, and note the http and not https), and you can easily direct copy files between machines over your network. Or use wget -r http://a.b.c.d:8000/ to batch download the contents of the directory. (On Android, I'll often use the Share option to send a few photos to Termux, then do the ifconfig/http.server trick in a Termux shell to locally serve them from my phone to my desktop over wifi.)
• Want to quickly send a URL or other snippet of text from your computer to your phone? Install qrencode from your package manager and then run qrencode -t ansi https://tildes.net or such.

Some additional helpful comands:

• man man - learn about types of man pages and documentation. The C stdlib and Perl libraries have their documentation baked into manpages.
• apropos - this will search man pages to find commands similar to your search term.
• which - if you want to know the path to the executable you're calling, especially if you have multiple versions, then this will find it. Use ls -l $(which <command>) to see if it's a symlink. The use alternatives to check if it's naively managed or if you have to use another tool to change the link.

Another well-known one that I learned somewhere up to 20 years ago: F5 to refresh. I was the nerdy kid in the family who was always using a computer or playing video games when I was at home. So why did I learn that from my sister?

Along the same lines, now that I think about it, I think I was around 20 when I learned about Ctrl+F. That was embarrassing.

My personal one is Siri timers. Instead of saying “set a timer for 5 minutes” or even “5 minute timer”, you can just say “5 minutes” and it assumes it is a timer. I know it sounds simple and obvious, but I was actually quite surprised when I heard someone do it. I’m not used to general laypeople knowing tech better than I do, let alone an actual shortcut.

For todays 1 in 10,000: CTRL/CMD + C to copy, CTRL/CMD + V to paste, CTRL/CMD + A to select all.

Bonus if you have a multi function mouse wheel or extra buttons: Assign CTRL+C to left tilt, CTRL+V to right tilt

Ctrl-L in a browser or a file explorer to focus the address bar and type a path. Works on all platforms, all major browsers, and most file explorers (Cmd instead of Ctrl on a Mac). Even works in file explorers where there is no “address bar” visible.

Mine would be the (fairly recent) realization that, when people (think they) are debating the pros and cons of Linux distros ... very often, without realizing it, they're actually debating the pros and cons of the DEs they used to try out those distros.

Definitely Ctrl+Shift+Esc on Windows. Gives immediate access to the Task Manager without having to go through an additional menu.

And to a lesser extent Windows Key + . brings up an emoji keyboard.

for macos I only discovered pbcopy and pbpaste last year. e.g. ls -1 | pbcopy to copy a listing.

As for applications I wish I found ages ago, SwiftBar is the best. Any script output in the menubar with cascading menus etc. Right now I'm tracking a specific car for sale in Rocket League, tracking drugs I'm taking, downloads from today in sabnzbd, unread email count with a list of subjects, and a simple calendar-like output for media (tv, scheduled movies, and sports for the day.)

more of an anti-pattern, but for windows users: try out Win+ alt + ctrl + shift + L and see what happens ;)

as a more interesting and useful utility: win + . (period) in a textbox context will bring up an emoji menu for you, to save you some web searching. Also includes gifs via Giphy to insert.

lastly, I really hope people know this one by now on Windows 11, but: a quicker way to get your old, more powerful context menu back rather than right click -> Show more options is to shift + right click. It's one of those tiny time saves that gives you back hours over the years.

as for some apps, I'll share 3 that I always install on any new device these days:

• Everything for a blazing fast search indexer. make sure to go into the options to set a hotkey to open the window and you're set to never use windows search again.

• ShareX if you find yourself screenshotting often and want to make some pipelines around it. it can be as simple as a more convenient full screenshot button, or automating an entire process to crop a screenshot, annotate it, save it to a folder with a name, and upload it to your favorite image host. Extremely customizable

• Wizrtee for a more powful disk space analyzer. Pretty fast, can open it in a context menu to analyze a given folder. Not as oft used a tool, but great way to quickly figure out where to save space.

I had been using bash for at least 7 or 8 years before somebody pointed out that I wasn't using any of the obvious readline bindings. These are handy since they don't just apply to bash; you can use them in anything that uses readline, although these days I guess there are fewer of those than in the 90s when I was learning.

This won't be a comprehensive list of what readline can do, but a handful of the ones that I use frequently enough to bother remembering

• ^t, transpose character under cursor with previous one, great for typos
• ^k cut everything after cursor. Use ^y to paste it elsewhere.
• ^x,^e open the current command line in $EDITOR. This is great if you have some gigantic command line in your history and you want to change something that requires moving back and forth in the command line a lot
• ^a move to the beginning of the line
• ^e move to end of line
• ^_ (i.e. ctrl-shift-hyphen) undo the last edit

The readline manpage has the full suite, there are a slew of them but these are the ones I've been using pretty much daily for decades.

I'm not sure if this counts or not.

When I was much younger, I didn't know that things like IDEs or even more advanced text edititors than notepad (or vi (yes not vim)) existed.
I remember a few horrible years of hand editing structures like XML and trying to count curly brackets by eye when I could have used like any decent editor/formatter/validator and got the answer in a split second.

You guys have covered tons of good stuff. The only one I can think of that hasn't been brought up is the the bang (!) and double bang (!!) commands.

Both can be used to run previous commands with some cool options.

So you can use ! followed by a string to match a previously run command from your history
e.g. Let's say you previously used ls -a (ls showing all files )
You can run it again, even if it isn't the most recent command in your history by typing !l.
Not too helpful with this simple command, but if you had a complex command and don't feel like manually going through your history it can save time.

The double bang (!!) is more simple and comes up more. It just repeats the previous command. So if you typed a command and forgot to use sudo, you can just type sudo !!. That one comes up pretty often for me, but be careful that its actually something you want to run with elevated permissions obviously.

You can also do some more advanced stuff with these like more advanced string matching and repeating the commands, but you'll need to look that up elsewhere and I am not sure I can give an accurate guide off the top of my head.

• holding alt when selecting text that is also a link. allows for easy selection while preventing you from following the link

• holding shift when using scroll wheel to scroll horizontally

In MacOS:

• Press cmd+shift+5 to open up the screenshot toolbar, then when clicking options you can decide to store the screenshot to clipboard, preview, desktop, etc.

• Swiping up with 3 (or four) fingers will give you all open windows, but swiping down will give you only the windows of that app

• When you're on a website and click upload, the file picker is showing, while that is open you can drag-and-drop any file from your finder right into there and it will navigate to that place in the filepicker

• Press cmd+space, hold cmd, then press 4, now you see your clipboard history (if feature is activated)

• Spread out with five fingers anywhere to reveal your desktop, do the opposite to revert

• In finder you can quickly swipe with three fingers left and right to go previous or next. For that you need to go to trackpad settings -> more gestures -> "swipe between pages". The tricky part is that in finder it only works with "three fingers", go figure... :-D It also then will work in browsers, it's faster then the two fingers gesture because it's without animation.

I will put my most commonly used Window MS Word shortcuts. Some have been mentioned already, but these are daily use to avoid RSI with the mouse. My keyboard also has a couple of macro keys, so I have assigned those to things without shortcuts like editing document layout/margins and paragraph settings.

Navigating

• Move the cursor one word to the left. Ctrl+Left arrow key
• Move the cursor one word to the right. Ctrl+Right arrow key

Selecting Text

• Select the word to the left. Ctrl+Shift+Left arrow key
• Select the word to the right. Ctrl+Shift+Right arrow key
• Select from the current position to the beginning of the current line. Shift+Home
• Select from the current position to the end of the current line. Shift+End
• Select from the current position to the beginning of the current paragraph. Ctrl+Shift+Up arrow key
• Select from the current position to the end of the current paragraph. Ctrl+Shift+Down arrow key

Editing and Formatting

• Decrease the font size by 1 point. Ctrl+Left bracket ([)
• Increase the font size by 1 point. Ctrl+Right bracket (])
• Center the text. Ctrl+E
• Align the text to the left. Ctrl+L
• Align the text to the right. Ctrl+R
• Zoom in and out with mouse. Ctrl+Scroll

Some fun ones I know for Windows are:

• show-command <command> (alias: shcm) will bring up a GUI for any Powershell command you give it

• Win+I will open the Settings app

• Win+Shift+T will let you copy text from anything using OCR

• When in File Explorer, typing cmd, powershell, or wt will open CMD/PowerShell/Windows Terminal respectively in the current directory

• Set-PSReadLineOption -PredictionSource History will try to auto complete your commands with ones that you previously entered (you may need to Install the PSReadLine module)

• Adding onto that, you can press Ctrl+R to search your command history

• Pressing Win+X then G will bring you into Computer Management, I will open PowerShell/Windows Terminal, and A will open an admin PowerShell/Terminal

• For some reason, if you're using a Chromium/Electron based app and it refuses to open, clicking the icon 3 times will make it open. I'm not 100% sure if this is just placebo but it has worked every time on Discord and Chrome (back when I used it)