Vincent Cheng

1% Improvements

Here’s a running list of tiny workflow tips that make my day-to-day noticeably smoother. Most of these are embarrassingly simple, but that’s the point! Habits that seem obvious to me might be totally new to someone else (and vice versa).

I will continually update this every ~month and try to only include things that I have kept up using for more than a month. Message me your favorites and I’ll include them!

  • Tmux
  • Raycast
    • Clipboard history is great. When people first told me about it, I couldn’t think of situations I would use this, but intentionally thinking about it for a week I realized how wrong I was and use it every day now!
    • Snippets: I bound @@ and !@ to common emails.
  • Rectangle is my favorite windows management tool. I’ve bound Cmd+Shift+j for left half, Cmd+Shift+k for right half, Cmd+Shift+b for maximize, Cmd+Shift+c for next display and use them 50+ times a day.
  • On Mac, Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 allows you to screenshot a subset of your screen and copies it to clipboard. Please use this. I’ve met >4 people who only use Cmd+Shift+4 which DOESN’T save the image to clipboard but rather saves it to desktop and shows up on the bottom left corner. Then, they scramble to drag it to where they want to paste it before it disappears.
    • For more, the default Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 takes two hands to press, but you can rebind this to Cmd+Shift+4 from System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > Keyboard > Screenshots (credits to Will).
  • Granola for recording meetings.
  • Beeper. Have all your chats in one app. Have Instagram and Discord DM notifications available without the distracting bits.
  • Youtube Playback Speed Control allows you to watch YouTube videos at 5x speed. It’s also nice to increase/decrease video speed arbitrarily with +/- buttons. Often, I want to go faster but am scared I’ll miss something if I use +5 seconds so I can go up to 4x and then slow back down which has a similar effect but is continuous so I don’t miss anything.
  • Vim for Google Docs extension
  • Window management: AltTab for Windows Alt+Tab on macOS. This is strictly superior to pure Cmd+Tab. However, clicking through many windows can be annoying, so an alternative is only using non-maximize windows (it’s not a big difference) and using Cmd+Tab to go between apps and Cmd+` to get between windows of the same app. Because of these, I never use swiping for different windows on my Mac trackpad anymore.
  • If your LLM starts generating a response and you realize you missed something, edit your original message directly instead of sending a follow-up correction. It keeps the conversation cleaner.
  • Add archive.is/[link] to view WSJ or other paywalled sites.
  • Shift+select tabs and drag out to get a set of tabs to a new window.
  • I bound Vim’s copy to clipboard ("+y) \. There are definitely a ton of vimrc shenanigans that I’m not abusing. Send me your favorite ones!
  • Whenever I see someone with a cool personal website, I send a 10 second email telling them it’s nice :))
  • (mostly for college students) My scooter is one of the highest value things I’ve bought in the past year and I can’t imagine my life without one now. This one is at least a 5% improvement It saves me at least an hour a day and lowers the activation energy required to go anywhere on campus since everything is ~equidistant. I’ve also convinced at least 4 other friends to buy their own.
  • Cmd+l to get to search bar
  • Cmd+1, Cmd+2, ... to navigate between tabs
  • Discord keybindings: Cmd+k to search for channel name, Cmd+Shift+u to upload file, Cmd+f for search
  • Excalidraw is good for sketching.
  • Dell 40 inch curved monitor.
  • You can use your iPad as an extended display to your Mac without any setup! Discovering this inspired me to write this post (credits to Wanhan).
  • A goddamn mouse. I use a random Logitech one and there are definitely better ones out there. Send me what you use!
  • Source: If you’re single, a useful habit to build is that whenever you see someone that makes you curious, you go talk to them. I mean in the supermarket and stuff. Not in a pickup artist way, but just being open to the world.
  • Obtain a full text version of a github repo: replace github.com/user/name_of_repo with uithub.com/user/name_of_repo
  • Binding next cell and previous cell in Google Colab since the Vim commands don’t work for navigating between cells.
  • Tab+Enter to fill out forms without using your mouse. Tab+"<ANSWER>" where you type the answers out from a dropdown menu works too.
  • For Apple Notes on Mac: There isn’t a default keybinding for strikethrough but you can bind it yourself through this.