# Tips and Tricks

Are you making the most of your desktop? Do you usually press Ctrl C on your keyboard to copy some text? Do you open a text editor to take a quick note? How do you share files with your friends? There are many ways to perform simple tasks, some more efficient than others. This chapter is going to show you a few particularities of the Linux Mint desktop, to make sure you make the most of your system.

## Copy and paste with the mouse!

Most people are used to clicking on the Edit menu or to right clicking on the content they want to copy. In Linux Mint you can do this as well, but you can also copy and paste content from the comfort of your mouse. Here's how it works: The left button of the mouse copies and the middle button pastes. It's as simple as that!

Let's give it a try. Launch LibreOffice Writer or a text editor, or any application of your choice that lets you input text. Now type a few sentences. Select some of the text you just typed with the left button of your mouse. Think you need to click on the Edit menu and press Copy? No? Bet you're thinking you would use a combination of keys on your keyboard such as Ctrl C. In Linux, it is much simpler. Just by selecting the text, you've already copied it. That's right... that text is now copied to your mouse buffer and you don't need to press anything else.

Now click on some other part of the document to move the cursor there and click the middle button of your mouse (or the wheel-click if you have a mouse with a wheel). As you can see the text you previously selected has now been pasted.

The more you get used to this the faster you'll get at copying and pasting content.

The buffer used by the mouse is not the same as the one used by the desktop. So you can actually copy something with your mouse and copy something else with Ctrl C or with the Edit menu. Thanks to this you can copy two elements at a time and depending on how you copied them you can paste them with either the middle mouse button or with Ctrl V or the Edit menu.

## Take notes with Tomboy

We all take notes. Whether it's an address given by someone over the phone, an ever-growing TODO list or some particular thing to remember, we're often faced with the situation where we need to take a quick note. Some of us have a lot of written notes around our computers and never seem to find a working pen when the situation arises, others waste time in launching tools that are not suitable for this particular use (LibreOffice Writer for instance is not very handy to take notes) and very few people actually use software dedicated to note-taking. Linux Mint happens to include a dedicated note-taking tool. It is called Tomboy Notes.

### Tomboy Notes

Tomboy Notes is a very easy tool to use. By clicking on it you get a list of all your notes. You can create new notes by clicking on Create New Note.

A new note opens up. By changing its title you'll also change its name. You can write whatever you want in the note and close it. The content you wrote in your note will always be accessible through Tomboy Notes; You don't need to save anything and you can even reboot or turn off the computer. Again, your note is saved automatically as you're writing it.

If you eventually decide that you no longer need to keep a particular note, you can open that note and click on the Delete button.

If you write down the name of another note's title within your note, Tomboy will automatically create a link to that other note and you'll be able to click that link to open the other note.

You can also use different formatting options within your note and use the many features provided by Tomboy Notes (synchronization, search features, export notes to PDF/HTML...etc).