Keyboard efficiency

Browsers

Open browsers from the shell:

• create aliases for these to simplify

# open home page redirect all diagnostic output to /dev/null
firefox &> /dev/null & 
google-chrome &> /dev/null &

# open web page in new tab
firefox https://example.com
google-chrome https://example.com

# open in new window
firefox --new-window https://example.com
google-chrome --new-window https://example.com

# open private window
firefox --private-window https://example.com
google-chrome --incognito https://example.com

HTML with curl and wget

These tools download web pages and other web content:

• curl prints output to stdout
• wget saves output to a file

curl https://example.com
wget https://example.com

Clipboard control

SHIFT + INSERT will paste into the terminal!

In Linux, copy and paste operations are part of a mechanism called X selections. There are two selection types:

• clipboard: standard, familiar clipboard. You copy, it is stored on the clipboard, then you paste content from the clipboard.
• primary selection: in certain applications, selected content is written to the primary selection, even if you don’t explicitly copy it. For example, when you highlight text in a window, it is automatically written to the primary selection.