Work Smarter, Not Harder. If I knew about these coding tricks earlier in my career, it would have saved me sooo much time. Here are 5 advanced copy and pasting tips that you can use to work smarter and more efficiently. You can follow along with the sample dataset below, or better yet, try it with your own data. FYI— I’m using Mac and Visual Studio Code , but feel free to use other OS and text editors. Sample dataset Laws Power - Robert Greene Be Here Now - Ram Dass Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink and Leif Babin How to Eat - Thich Nhat Hanh How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie Radical Focus - Christina Wodtke ReWork - Jason Fried & David Hansson Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts Soft Skills - John Sonmez Tao Wu - RZA The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho The Art War - Sun Tzu The Book Mistakes - Skip Prichard The Culture Code - Daniel Coyle The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz 48 of of of of 1. Vertical selection My objective is to add the tag in front of every row. Instead of doing it the old fashion way of copy and pasting multiple times, I do it once with the help of vertical selection. <li> hold shift + option + cmd + arrow direction 2. Adding value to the start of every row Another way to add value to the start of every row is by using regex . (.*) Regex or regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. It’s built in to most text editors and can be found in the feature. find 1. Open Replace 2. regex .* 3. Enter ^ 4. Enter value replace 5. Execute Find and Enable in Find in 3. Adding value to the end of every row My next objective is to add the closing tag at the end of every row. To do so, I would also use regex, but with a different search pattern. </li> 1. Open Replace 2. regex .* 3. Enter $ 4. Enter value replace 5. Execute Find and Enable in Find in 4. Shifting rows without highlighting and dragging What happens if I want to quickly rearrange my data? Again, I can use the traditional cut and paste or highlighting and dragging with the mouse… but there is a faster way. hold + arrow direction option 5. Copy and pasting without copy and pasting This last tip is one of my favorites. Instead of copy and pasting and entering new lines in between, I can quickly duplicate the values with a shortcut key. hold + option + arrow direction shift Wrapping up Copy and pasting stuff is great. Regex and advanced keyboard shortcuts takes it to another level. Remember folks: work smarter, not harder. Thanks for reading! Originally posted on . The Startup
