Share your favorite time-saving computer hack

I'll start: on my Mac, I installed Raycast to replace the default launcher.

There are tons of features, but the life-changing one for me is Clipboard History. You can copy multiple items and easily paste any of them.

• Say you copied text A and then B (Cmd+C)
• Before, you would only be able to paste B (Cmd+V)
• After, we can grab A from our clipboard history (Option+V for me) and paste it.

Supports images and colors as well as text!

I've put my phone into greyscale/black and white so it's less addictive. I can still access information I want without as high of dopamine triggers to click the red dot or illuminated number of notifications.

iOS: Settings > Accessibility > Display & Brightness > Color Filters

I think we as engineers at tech companies understand how much money goes into optimizing those triggers to take people's time and money, and actually a business idea of the future is designing apps or even an OS for the mindfulness and mental health of the user not just extracting maximum time/money from them right now. Unfortunately it would be harder to make short term money that way. My 30 year prediction/prayer for tech is we will have this

I almost never go above 10 tabs - I close older tabs extremely aggressively. The way I see it, if something was truly important, you should build the meta-skill of learning how to retrieve that information again.

I don't understand 100+ tab people honestly, haha. Instead of doing the hard thing of reverse-engineering the organic path to your important information and building up that muscle, you're going on a 2-minute treasure hunt furiously clicking across tiny tabs with cut-off titles. 🤷

I use Rectangle for arranging and moving windows on multiple external monitors. The free version does most of the job for my use case.

• This may be a no-brainer but aliasing my terminal commands, from my most-used git commands to running test files.

• Speeding up my mouse! Credit to: https://noahkagan.com/productivity-hacks/

• Using only one screen/monitor

• Magic Trackpad > Magic Mouse (I’ve only ever tried these pls don’t come for me)

I use CleanShot X for screenshots and screen capturing (disclaimer: that is an affiliate link). The price is really steep at $29, but it helps so much for visual communication like:

• Pointing an arrow to a UI element
• Highlighting areas
• Adding in text to make sure if the screenshot is shared, the context is not lost

So other engineers can quickly understand what you mean. I use it daily for everything. If I priced each individual feature I use at $0.05 every time I use it, I would've already gotten my money back in value.

A few browser tips that save me a lot of time (Firefox on Windows 10):

• Ctrl+Tab to switch between two most recent tabs
• Ctrl+Shift+T to open a new one
• Ctrl+W to close the active one
• Ctrl+L to highlight the URL bar so you can quickly copy for sharing to a teammate or do a new search
• Instead of searching manually through bookmark folders, type an '' in your URL bar followed by the text that you may have saved the bookmark under. E.g " some obscure team runbook"

I also rely heavily on Ctrl+H to find/replace with regex in the text editor Sublime. You can for example search for all commas in a stack trace and replace them with a newline character for easier reading.

In windows, I use Windows key + Shift + S to capture a certain portion of the screen.
"Picture speak more than words."
For example, you can quickly screenshot your code and paste it into a chat with Ctrl + V.

(italicized text accidental, replace with surrounding * characters)