I work as a freelance and with one of my clients I find myself copying and pasting from one application to another the whole day and it is really taking a toll on my hands.

I will be copying from a spreadsheets or other office applications to Slack Apps to web applications back and forth the whole day. You would not believe how keyboard unfriendly the applications we use are.

I have tried to set things up with a clipboard manager, a text expander and Albert, but it is becoming obvious that I need to find a better way to work, because this is really taking sore hands and arms to a whole new level.

In addition I would like some easy way to keep notes, things to remember and to-dos, etc. For this I have tried to use Obisidian, Clickup, Notion and such applications, but in my opinion it is not easy to find the information I need, when I need it in those.

At the moment I am working on ManjaroLinux 21.3.6 Ruah with XFCE.

However I am a very basic user, I am not very familiar with command line. But if learning that will make my life easier I am willing to bite the bullet.

I have been looking briefly at ecmacs, VIM and and windows managers like qtile, but I am uncertain if these would be useful for me. I do understand that programmers, developers etc will find these apps immensely useful, but what about a basic office user like me? I feel uncertain if I will be loosing my time trying to adapt these.

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

A bit confused by this; a 'very basic user'...who has been using Linux for fourteen years?? And not really sure what your question is, because CTRL-C/CTRL-V copies and pastes to ANY application that I'm aware of. Also, you can right click and select copy, or just select with the mouse and middle-click (although that may be for KDE...not sure of XFCE).

Copying and pasting isn't hard, and there are a myriad of ways to do it, but it seems like you're asking how you should set up your workspace, and that's not anything we can answer. That's up to you to determine what works best. There are many note applications, to-do list applets, etc., but without knowing what you WANT (and what you do not want), there's nothing we can suggest.

Sorry that I was unclear.
I am not certain what I need, I guess so I was just throwing it out there, with the faint hope that somebody once was in a similar situation and found a good solution.


But yes I am a basic Linux user who has used it for 14 years.

There's only a solution to a clear question; you don't say what you don't like, what you actually need, and we can't guess as to your workflow and what you're doing now. Only that copy/paste has several options. You can use KDE or Gnome on Manjaro (https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/I...p_Environments), and get some more options, but again...only YOU are going to be able to determine what's best for your needs/wants/usage.

There are post-it note type applets for KDE's desktop, KOrganizer for calendar/to-do lists, and many more. Gnome has similar things. I can double-click to select text (or click/drag), and middle-click to paste, in 99% of apps.

Depending on the 'application', you could possibly use keyboard shortcuts; else highlight, copy, paste via keyboard or mouse.

Maybe you could program the application with its macro language to do the hard parts(?).

Or find a different way of working with the data(?).

So what you're saying is mouse actions are killing your hands but you think the same amount of Set Mark, Select Region, CTRL-x, CTRL-c, and CTRL-v is going to be better?

I feel you need to think about what you're covering.

Some number of apps and documents, you can't escape using the mouse to select, but you can use the keyboard to copy/paste.

I'm a person who does prefer key sequences, but I do know that if I want to select certain text, I can't always avoid the mouse.

I'm not sure finding an ability to use the keyboard 100% of the time is realistic, nor any solution which is going to solve hand fatigue.

But if you're adamant, read up on each app in question to determine how to use key sequences to select and copy text, they're all going to be different if there's no keyboard edit option. And some of them will not provide this capability.

For instance "some" web pages you can save and save as text, or even complete where you can possibly open a file with an editor. Two problems (1) it's more steps overall (2) now you have taken up space on disk by saving something.

For slack maybe there's a "save conversation" option. Once again you've added more steps and saved something that may need to be erased or managed at a future time.

A lot of PDF files are protected so you can't select and copy text at all.

If it's not immediately intuitive how to do it, try some web searching, but do not recommend making a huge project out of it.