Three newish tech features I really wish had happened sooner

Closing one of the tabs in split view is as simple as hitting the X next to it in the top tab window.

One of the tradeoffs of leaving work is no longer having a captive audience to share my delight in new tech features that crop up. Admittedly, I just as often had to share updates about the status of the latest bug, but I also got to spread good news when one of our software providers implemented a feature that could make our work lives better. Hence the reason you're seeing me dispense tech advice into the ether, because I just have to share it somewhere. 

Chrome's new split screen feature

Why, oh why, couldn't this feature have existed while I was working? So many programs I worked with were web-based, and having a super slick way to have two browser windows open side by side without any need to manually manipulate the window widths would have been a total game-changer. Just hold down the shift key before clicking on the second tab you want to add to a split view and then right-click to pick "Add to new split view." If you right-click on one of the combined tabs again under "arrange split view" you'll see options to rearrange the order of the tabs, close one of the open tabs or just restore them to separate tabs. (Or you can right-click on any tab to select that feature and then navigate to add a different tab in split view.) It may not have been available when I could have made the best use of it, but I've still made great use of this new capability, starting with having my Christmas shopping Google spreadsheet open next to a website for shopping. You can also drag and drop a window into a split view, which I learned from this post.

Windows 11 glyphs palette

Another feature I totally would have killed for at work, but one that's still super handy for things like inserting fractions in a blog post. I've used the Windows-V clipboard history feature to pin the fractions, but now can use Windows-V to get at an extensive Symbols panel and history as well as clipboard history, and it remembers your most recently inserted, so I'm finding that just as handy as the clipboard history since I don't need to cull the history to keep the fractions at the top.

Split view in Slack

Also just too late for most of my work life: Slack's new split view. It lets you see two conversations, two channels or two canvases side by side. Just click on a channel (or DM or canvas), Control-click on another channel and then right click on the first channel top pick open in split view. For canvases and lists, the option is under the three-dot menu at the upper right.

Windows+Shift+Minus for an em dash

This one isn't super new, apparently, but it was new to me when I ran across it. This was a development in keyboard shortcuts that I missed when it first happened, probably because I wasn't on Windows 11 at the time. Sure, some people think the em dash is like the mark of the AI devil, but you won't convince the style committee of that one. I worked in a program that had stomped all over any other existing em dash shortcut except for the Alt 0151, so that would have been super helpful.