My Mind Was Blown Today (Ctrl+L)

So this new guy on our team asked me for cli tool recommendations today (they’re setting up a fresh dev machine). Of course I jumped at the chance to force my preferences on someone else - as is tradition among developers.

Among my list of “absolutely essential tools you cannot live without” was tldr - that nifty little community-driven alternative to man pages. You know, for when you just want to see how to actually use a command without wading through 47 pages of arcane options you’ll never touch.

Anyway, later that day I fat-fingered something in my terminal and accidentally triggered tldr for the clear command. And there it was, staring me in the face: Ctrl+L does exactly the same thing as typing “clear”!

I literally stopped and stared at my screen for a second. Do you have any idea how many times I type “clear” every day? Like, DOZENS of times. I’ve probably typed that stupid command thousands of times over my career. And all along I could have just hit Ctrl+L?!

It’s such a tiny thing, but it’s been living rent-free in my head all day. Those microseconds add up! Plus it just feels cooler to use a keyboard shortcut instead of typing out a command like some kind of caveman.

Sometimes I wonder how many other obvious shortcuts I’m missing that everyone else already knows about…