🧰Linux Quality of Life Tools🛠️

Robert Scocca
5 min readAug 17, 2024

These are a few of the best tricks I’ve come across for slightly increasing your productivity on a Linux Desktop. Once you are habituated to use these tools they’ll pay dividends in time. Also these tools are simply very satisfying to use; after a while you’ll wonder how you’ve been living without them!

Bypass the paywall with this link.

Search Hotkey

How many times do you google something a day? The average user conducts 3–4 Google searches per day. If you’re researching for a paper or project that number is bound to go up dramatically. There are key binds for so many other things but why not for your favorite search engine? I'm sure you can imagine how much more practical it is to bind searches to a key rather than opening a new tab, typing in a search engine address, and pressing enter.

Here’s how you bind a key for Google searches with your Linux terminal:

  1. Make sure you have xclip installed: sudo apt install xclip

2. Create a new file to put your script into: vim google.sh

3. This script opens a Google tab in Firefox with our search query:

#!/bin/bash
bash -c 'firefox "http://www.google.com/search?q=$(xclip = -o)"'

4. Then give permissions to make script executable: chmod 764 google.sh

5. For most Debian based Linux Distributions that use gnome, you probably have a program called Settings. Go to this or use your…

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