524 tips · new ones added continuously
Every tip is one concrete thing you will do better or faster. Filter by what you use and who you are — or just search.
Hold Alt and drag with the mouse — Word selects a rectangle of text across lines. Perfect for deleting a column of characters that a normal selection can't grab.
Asterisks around a word make it bold, underscores make it italic, a dash makes a bullet. A longer work message suddenly looks like a document.
The “This site wants to show notifications” popup can be switched off globally with one toggle. Sites stop asking — and you stop dismissing them.
Gmail, your calendar, or Teams can run in their own window with an icon on the taskbar — no address bar and no risk of an accidentally closed tab.
F2
Renaming a symbol with F2 changes a function or variable everywhere it's used, across files. Smarter than find and replace.
Alt+↓
Alt+up/down arrow moves a line or block to a new spot, Shift+Alt+arrow duplicates it. No more juggling Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V.
Teams, Zoom, and Meet can all show live speech captions, and Czech is among the supported languages. A lifesaver in noise, with bad audio, or a quiet speaker.
Zoom and Teams can filter out barking, keyboard clatter, and next-door drilling. Just switch noise suppression to high in your audio settings.
Edge and Firefox can move your tabs into a column on the side. Twenty tabs with readable titles instead of a row of nameless little teeth.
Ctrl+Shift+D
Have to close your browser right now but you're mid-research with twenty tabs open? One shortcut saves them all as a bookmarks folder.
Ctrl+F5
Broken layout, an old version, a button that doesn't respond — Ctrl+F5 forces the browser to download the page again, from scratch.
Forgot sudo? Don't retype the command: “sudo !!” reruns it with admin rights. And “!$” inserts the last argument from the previous line.
Dragging a file from File Explorer or Finder into a terminal window inserts its full path — correctly quoted, without a single typo.
Open the current folder from the terminal in your graphical file manager with one command: “open .” on a Mac, “explorer.exe .” on Windows and in WSL.
Ctrl+W
A typo at the start of a long command isn't a reason to hold down Backspace. Ctrl+W deletes a word, Ctrl+U a line, Ctrl+A jumps to the start.
Ctrl+R
You don't have to fish a long command from last week out with the up arrow. Ctrl+R searches history for any fragment and autocompletes the whole thing.
Jumping between two directories? You don't have to type the full paths back and forth — “cd -” always jumps to the previous folder.
Right-click pins a chat to the top of the list, and a key message above the whole conversation — visible to everyone. No more hunting for a link from last week.
You don't have to email links to yourself. Chrome generates a QR code for a page, and Chrome and Firefox can both send a tab straight to your phone.
One command uploads your public key to a server — from then on you log in without a password, faster and more securely.
The file ~/.ssh/config remembers addresses, usernames, ports, and keys for you. Connecting to a server shrinks down to two words.
A site won't log you in, or it's stuck in a loop? Don't clear your whole history. Cookies can be wiped for just that one troublesome site.
Colleagues will forgive a grainy picture, but not a booming mic sound from across the room. A mic near your mouth is the cheapest meeting upgrade there is.
Music from your laptop, and when the phone rings, the headphones switch to the call on their own. A feature your headphones probably have — turned off.
Slack has a conversation with just you — a private space for notes, links, and half-written messages, synced between your computer and phone.
Slack and Teams can both send a message later — an arrow next to the send button, or a right-click. Write the idea down now, don't disturb your colleague.
Read a message on your phone at the bus stop and now there's no trace of it at work? Alt+click puts it back among the unread. And Esc, the opposite way, clears a whole channel.
The school only writes to one address — and the other parent hears about meetings secondhand. A Gmail filter can auto-forward school emails to your partner.
Shift+Delete
Does your browser keep offering a typo or an old site? Select the suggestion with the arrow key and press Shift+Delete — it's gone for good.
One function pulls data from another spreadsheet into yours — and keeps it current. No more manually copying numbers between files.