General keyboard(and mouse) productivity
I’m writing this just becuase I have seen people clicking and dragging mouse just to select a single word many times. And I just wanted to write some things down immediately (Feel free to suggest more and we’ll probably add it here)🤣.
Since I’m an engineer (software by profession), apart from general OS shortcut keys, all/most of the things will look centred around text/code editors like Sublime, VsCode, IntelliJ IDEs etc. Most of the shortcuts mentioned here are the ones which I noticed missing while pair programming with someone sharing their screen 🧑💻.
That urge to tell someone, please use Alt + Tab to switch to previous widow 🤣.
Also I’ll try to write windows and mac shortcuts separately (gradually over ⌛), but mostly switching Ctrl with CMD should do the job.
Lets get started 🙆🏻
1. Double and Tripple mouse click
These two were so basic that I was surprised 😯. (But something so obvious for some might not be obvious for others)
Double click anywhere inside a word to select entire word. This seems much better than
“go to start of word, click and scroll all the way till end of the word”
except if you are selecting multiple words at once, where I often find keyboard shortcut better.
Tripple click inside a line to select entire current line
I just have these 2️⃣related to mouse 🐁.
Keyboard Shortcuts
2. The very basic ones
These are mostly known to everyone, but mentioning them just in case you never thought of using shortcuts before 👶.
Ctrl + XCut
Ctrl + C Copy
Ctrl + V Paste
Ctrl + T Browser shortcut to open a new tab
Ctrl + N Open new file/new window depending on application
Ctrl + S Save current thing
And not to miss out lock screen shortcuts
Win + L Windows
Ctrl + CMD + Q Mac
Quite important when you are working in an office space and need to always lock screen before leaving your desk 🥤🍽️.
3. The ones I want everyone to use
Use these when you want to move cursor within a piece of text using left/right arrow keys faster ️🏃♂, by jumping word by word instead of character by character.
Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow Move cursor word by word
For normal selection, you use Shift + Arrow keys. For jumping word by word, again just add Ctrl to the mix
Shift + Ctrl + Arrow Keys Select word by word
4. 🪟Window management shortcuts
I use this so much that after a while, Ctrland Alt keys on my keyboard sometimes look like this after a while
Alt + Tab ⏩Cycle between open applications
Alt + Shift + Tab ⏪ Reverse cycle between open applications
If you are new, you might find above shortcuts irritating or useless, but
soon it’ll become automatic just like driving. And it obviously makes things much faster.
Mac also has this good shortcut to switch between instances of the same application, which I don’t think is possible on windows (maybe works with some custom shortcuts 🤷🏻♂️). I use this a lot when(always) I have multiple windows open on IntelliJ or V S Code.
CMD + ` (Command + backtick) ⏩
CMD + Shift + ` ⏪
Cycle between tabs of an application like Brower, Code Editor, IDE etc.
Ctrl + Tab Forward ▶️
Ctrl + Shift + Tab ◀ ️Backward
In editors it will cycle you through open files, on brower throught open tabs and like that.
5. Box selection
Well this varies from edior to editor, but I’ve just kept it here so that you can search “box select in xyz” and learn about it.
This is super useful if you are writing code🧑🏻💻!! Trust me 🙂
⚠️️️⚠️️️ ️️️Valid till keyboards become obsolete ️️⚠️⚠️
Say 👋🏻👋🏻 on Linkedin.
