How To Become A Computer Power User (In 5 Steps!)

Let's face it, you're not really a computer nerd. You're really a noob when it comes to computers, but you want to learn more, right? You want to become a computer power user because you want to be able to impress your friends and get all the hot chicks. Well, today I'm going to share with you five ways that you can become a computer power user. Number one, use a keyboard-driven run launcher to launch your commands. For example, here in my system, I use Rofi as a run launcher, but we have many run launchers on Linux. You have things like Rofi, D-Menu, you have GUI options such as Albert and Synaptic and U-Launcher. There's a ton of these things on Linux, but you want to be able to just bring up with a keyboard shortcut your run launcher and then type the command you want to launch. For example, PCMANFM, which is my file manager, right? And then I can run the run launcher again and it's already on my Brave browser, but if it wasn't, I could type B. I don't have to type the full word. It's not like it's a lot of typing when you do these things, right? I can just type B and it launches Brave. It actually launched Brave on a different monitor, but if I send it to this monitor, you can see it did launch that window. If I do my run launcher again, just start typing O, B, I could launch OBS, which I'm already in because I'm recording this video using OBS. Run launchers are very efficient, very fast, and they're very easy to learn. Like if you're somebody that thinks, well, that's a lot of typing, trust me, even if you're a really bad typer, you're kind of a peck typer, right? Using a run launcher, switching over to a run launcher on a difficulty scale of one to 10, I would give using a run launcher a difficulty score of two. In fact, I would say that using a keyboard driven run launcher is far easier than using your traditional menu based launcher. So if I go to a standard kind of menu system, like you would find on traditional desktops here in Linux, or you're using Windows or Mac OS, you know, trying to navigate this with the mouse and you got to go through this complicated menu system, then sometimes you got to go three levels deep to find the application that you're trying to run. For me, I just want to do my keyboard shortcut to get into my run launcher and quickly type a couple of letters and launch what I want to launch and be done with it. The second tip on how you can become a computer power user is start using keyboard shortcuts. Use keyboard shortcuts for the most common commands. So the most common command obviously would be the run launcher. So switch to the run launcher and then key bind that. So you have a keyboard shortcut to bring that up every time you need it. The second most common command you should keyboard shortcut is closing a window. So the window with focus. So wherever the mouse has a focus on that window, you should always have a key binding to close that thing. Something simple. I like using SuperShift-C. SuperShift-C closes that. And it doesn't matter what Linux desktop I'm in, or even if I'm in Windows or Mac or whatever it is, you know, they all have the ability usually to set a key binding for how to close the window with focus. And I've always got that set no matter what I'm doing, because think about it. Every single window you open, eventually you want to close, right? And you're going to do that maybe a hundred times today on your computer. And the fact that so many people in traditional desktop environments are going and trying to find the close button, you know, if it's got a close button, you're going and having to use the mouse and you don't want to use the mouse for such a common repetitive task. Key bind that thing. Some other useful key bindings would also be key bind the browser. You bring that up probably. That's most common program you use. Key bind that. So in my case, I've got SuperW for web browser, right? SuperW brings up my brave browser here. SuperShift-C to close. So on a scale of 1 to 10, as far as the difficulty, like if you start using keyboard shortcuts for all of these common tests, I would say the difficulty level of this is maybe 3 of 10. If you think that this is hard, it's really not. If you start doing some of this stuff within a few days, you will start loving the fact that you have these key bindings for these repetitive tasks and you'll wonder why you didn't do this sooner. Tip number three, start using a tiling window manager. Now, I know this is going to be a bit of a controversial one because some people really resist the idea of using a tiling window manager because they don't see the point. What's the point of having windows that tile? Well, truthfully, it's not about the tiling windows themselves. It's about how tiling window managers handle workspaces. To be a computer power user, you have to learn how to use workspaces efficiently. And workspaces on tiling window managers operate in a totally different manner than your standard desktop environments. For one thing, you get many more workspaces. Also, tiling window managers sets each monitor to its own workspace. So if you're a multi-monitor user, you need to use a tiling window manager. For example, if I open this terminal and I want to send it to the far left monitor, I've got three monitors here. I can send that to that monitor. It's over here now, right? Now I'm still on my middle monitor that I'm recording here. I can open a new window here. So most of the time, it's not about tiling. I've got three monitors. I've got one window on one workspace on one monitor, another window on another workspace on a different monitor, and I can swap between the two, right? I can go back to this window or this window or back to this window and, you know, supershift C to close all of this. So I think this is something that many people have not explained properly. Tiling window managers, it's not the tiling feature that's the most important. I mean, it's an interesting feature, but the most important feature of the tiling window manager is how they handle workspaces. Now, switching to tiling window managers, this is a little more difficult than switching to using a run launcher or switching to using keyboard shortcuts for some common tasks. A tiling window manager is an investment. You're going to have to configure it. You might have to learn how to script and program a little bit. It's not going to be complicated, right? But I would say the difficulty on this on a scale of one to 10 is about a five. Tip number four on how to become a computer power user is learn the terminal. Learn your basic terminal commands. So you should learn how to navigate around the file system. So, you know, you should learn the LS command to list the contents of the directories you're in. You should learn CD so you could CD around the file system, wherever it is you want to go. You should learn how to copy files to different locations, move files to different locations, delete files. You should learn all the common file management kind of commands. And this stuff is not that hard. And then later you should get into some of the more interesting commands like grep, sed, all, you know, a lot of the new core utils. So the terminal, a lot of people imagine the terminal is a really complicated thing to learn, like all these command line utilities. And it is an investment. It's not hard, but it is a time investment on a difficulty scale. I would give this a six out of 10. And the fifth tip on how to become a computer power user is you need to learn VIM. So whatever text editor you're using, if it's a standard kind of text editor like VS code or some blind text or I don't know, notepad plus plus, whatever it is you're using, those are not extensible. Those are not power user kind of text editors. You need to get into the truly extensible, configurable text editors, things like VIM, NeoVim, Emacs. But the very first one you need to learn, even if you progress into other extensible text editors along the way, you have to learn VIM. It's just a requirement. If you want to become a power user, VIM is a necessity. I could get into a file here in VIM and VIM allows me, for example, these first three lines, maybe I want to put these at the end of the file. Well, I could do a 3DD to delete those lines. I could shift G to go to the end of the document. And now I could do AP to paste those lines I deleted from before. Now they're at the end of the document. You know, you do things quickly with text. You can really manipulate and move text around in a big way that you can't do in a standard text editor. Maybe I want to change all of these instances of alias to a different word. Well, I could do that. I could do colon percent S and then slash. And we're going to substitute alias with alien and then tack a G on at the end. We just did a global substitution. And now I've got alien in all of those spots where alias was before. Now, oh, I didn't want to do that. U to undo, right? U to undo again, U to undo again. And the file is back to where it was. Now, when it comes to learning VIM, I will say there is a steep learning curve. This is an investment, right? You're going to have to put some effort into this on a scale of 1 to 10. I would give the difficulty here as an 8 out of 10. So this is definitely the most challenging of the five tips of the day. But I'm going to give you one bonus tip because I think a sixth tip is required here. And I think you need to strongly consider switching to Linux. So if you're using a operating system that is not Linux, specifically, if you're using Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Chrome OS, for whatever reason, I don't know why you would use that thing, but you should be on Linux because Linux is the operating system that allows you to become a power user, right? It allows you to do all the things that I've demonstrated here today, the run launcher, the keyboard shortcuts, tiling window managers, especially learning the terminal, especially learning VIM, especially, right? You can do all of that on Linux and you don't necessarily have to jump into all of these at once. I would install a user-friendly distribution if you're brand new to Linux, install something like Linux Mint here, right? Linux Mint here is a very friendly kind of new user-friendly distribution that looks and feels much like Windows. So if you're coming over from Microsoft Windows, I think you'd be right at home in this thing, right? And you could gradually learn how to add shortcuts for things. For example, in this desktop environment here, it's a standard desktop environment, but I've already added some keyboard shortcuts for myself so I can do super enter to get my terminal up, super shift C to close the window, right? I've already done that, right? So you could start doing that and then add a run launcher like Rofi and then maybe eventually install a tiling window manager on top of Linux Mint. Quit using the Cinnamon desktop or the Monte desktop, whatever it is you chose, and start learning a tiling window manager and then start learning that terminal because it obviously comes with a terminal. Learn how to use this thing, learn all the commands that are available, and then eventually learn VIM, right? Because this is where the real magic happens once you learn VIM. It doesn't look like VIM is installed out of the box on Linux Mint, so first you'd have to install VIM. And switching to Linux is not that hard. If I had to give this a rating of 1 to 10 as far as difficulty switching to Linux, if you're switching to a standard user-friendly Linux distribution like a Linux Mint or an Ubuntu or MX Linux, Linux Lite, any of that kind of stuff, the difficulty is about a 2 out of 10. Like, anybody can do this, trust me. There's millions and millions of just normal computer users that are not nerds, that are not really tech-savvy at all, that are running Ubuntu, for example, on their home computers or on their laptops, and they're doing just fine. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Matt Steeve, 40mmCap, Caveman, Darloff Lee, Jersey Killer Mark, Methos, Erjan, Paul, Peace Archimedora, Realities4Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Morgentuin, Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about how to become a power user wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these fine people, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. Because I don't have any corporate sponsors, I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open-source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.