Franco Pasut Blog

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. What is the "Super" Key? 3. What is the Taskbar? 4. The Core Concept: Super + Number 5. To Pin or Not to Pin? That is the Question. 6. More Than Just Windows: The "Super + Number" Shortcut on Linux 7. Beyond the OS: Browsers and Outlook 8. The Bottom Line 1. Introduction In modern desktop environments, from Windows to mainstream GNU/Linux distributions, Alt+Tab remains the go-to shortcut for window switching. While seamless for light multitasking, this method hits a wall as your workflow grows. Once you have dozens of active windows, what was once a quick "flip" becomes a tedious cycle of repetitive keystrokes. Even Alt+Esc fails to address the root of the problem, as it still forces you to manually scan through an endless stack of applications to find the one you need. There is, however, a faster and more surgical approach: the Super + Number combination. In this article, I will e...

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Managing operations with PDF Arranger 3. Managing the same operations with PDFtk. 4. In summary 1. Introduction The “PDF” is the essentially static document format par excellence. However, even PDF documents can be modified, especially with operations such as deleting, adding, reversing pages, inserting text, and more. There are various applications, including free ones, for performing these operations. In this article, I will report some parallel observations between two systems for page manipulation: one graphical, PDF Arranger, and one command line, PDFtk. PDF Arranger is a free and open source application (a fork of PDF-Shuffler) ideal for merging, splitting, rotating, and cropping PDF files in an intuitive way. PDFtk is one of the most powerful tools for manipulating PDFs in command line mode. I would like to point out that this article does not claim to be exhaustive on the two systems mentioned, but is onl...