Everyday Tips & Tricks

None of these are big ideas. They’re the small, daily-driver wins — the ones that save you ten seconds a hundred times a day. Individually trivial; collectively, a different relationship with your tools.

Custom Chrome search engines

Type less and find things faster by teaching Chrome a custom search shortcut.

Setup:

1. Click the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner of Chrome.
2. Open Settings.
3. Select Search engine.
4. Click Manage search engines and site search to expand it.
5. Next to Site search, click Add.
6. Fill in the fields — for example:
   • Search engine: Google Drive
   • Shortcut: gd
   • URL with %s in place of query: https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=%s
7. Click Add.

To use it: click into the address bar, type the shortcut (gd) followed by a space or tab, type your search term, and hit Enter.

Searching emojis in Slack

In Slack’s search bar, use the hasmy: keyword with an :emoji: to recall messages quickly. For example, hasmy::pushpin: pulls up every message I’ve added a 📌 to as a “do this later” marker — a lightweight way to get a task out of your head without losing it. I use 👀 the same way for “needs more of my time.”

You can do the same through the UI: run any search, then click the Reactions dropdown and pick a reaction to filter by.

To find messages with a given reaction from anyone (not just you), use has: instead — has::eyes: surfaces everything the team has flagged for a closer read.

Routing Slack messages to a channel

With Reacji Channeler, you can configure Slack so that reacting to a message with a specific emoji automatically reposts it to a designated channel.

1. Set up the rule in Reacji Channeler, mapping an emoji to a target channel.
2. Use that emoji anywhere in Slack and watch the message get reposted.

One use case I like: create a channel that collects all the “sad” emojis, so you get a real-time feed of the dumpster fires across the company — useful signal you’d otherwise have to go hunting for.

Use VS Code like a boss

Multi-cursor editing is the single biggest VS Code productivity unlock — once it’s muscle memory, editing many lines at once feels normal. A few ways to get there:

Mouse-based selection. Hold Alt (Windows/Linux) or Option (Mac) and click on multiple lines to drop a cursor on each.

Add cursors above/below. Place your cursor, then hold Ctrl + Alt (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Option (Mac) and press Down or Up to add cursors on consecutive lines.

Select matching words. Select a word, then press Ctrl + D (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + D (Mac) repeatedly to grab each next occurrence and edit them together.

Select all matches at once. Select a word, then press Ctrl + Shift + L (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Shift + L (Mac) to select every matching occurrence in the file.

From the Command Palette. Open it with Ctrl + Shift + P (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Shift + P (Mac) and search for Insert Cursor Above or Insert Cursor Below.

Box (column) selection. Hold Alt (Windows/Linux) or Option (Mac) and drag to create a vertical box selection, then type to edit every line in it.

Git

You don’t need to memorize git — but a good cheat sheet next to your keyboard pays for itself. I keep Julia Evans’ one within reach: the git cheat sheet PDF from Wizard Zines — the same Wizardzines I lean on across the whole learning path. When you want to actually understand what those commands are doing, the free Pro Git book is the canonical reference.