Keyboard Shortcuts

Browserland ships a set of default keyboard shortcuts for the actions you use most: moving between columns, switching workspaces, launching terminals, and toggling window modes. Every shortcut is rebindable, so you can make the desktop match your muscle memory.

How to rebind a shortcut

All shortcuts are user-rebindable in Control Panel → Input → Keybindings. Open the Control Panel (right-click the + button and choose Control panel, or the desktop → 🎛 Control panel, or press Ctrl+Alt+p), find the action you want, and record a new combo for it.

• To change a binding, press that action's Set button and then the combination you want; Clear removes the binding. Only Ctrl / Alt / Meta combinations are accepted, so ordinary typing still reaches the terminal.
• Bindings are stored per host (a tab per broker), but the page only obeys the bindings of the broker it was loaded from (the local tab). Editing a remote host's tab changes what you get when you open that broker's own page.

The in-app guide (the "?" chip at the bottom-right of the taskbar) also injects one Keyboard shortcuts entry per bindable action, showing its current combo or "Unbound" — handy for checking what is mapped right now.

Toggle help is unbound by default. The "Toggle help" action has no default key. Assign your own combo under Control Panel → Input → Keybindings if you want to open the in-app guide from the keyboard. (You can always open it by clicking the "?" chip at the bottom-right of the taskbar.)

Fixed terminal keys

A few keys inside a terminal are fixed rather than rebindable: Ctrl+Shift+C copies the current selection, Ctrl+Shift+V pastes, and on an https (or localhost) page Alt+V checks the clipboard for an image and pastes it into the terminal as an uploaded file path — with no image on the clipboard the keypress reaches the app unchanged, so Claude Code keeps its own Alt+V hotkey. See Window Types for how image paste works.

Copy and paste into a terminal. Selecting text with the mouse copies it the moment you release the button — there is no copy key to press. Ctrl+Shift+C is the explicit chord for the same thing, and it exists because plain Ctrl+C is left alone so it can still interrupt whatever is running. To paste, use your browser's paste shortcut (Ctrl+V, or Cmd+V on macOS), Ctrl+Shift+V, or right-click. Right-click pastes directly on an https or localhost page, though a browser may ask you to confirm the first time; on a plain-http LAN origin (http://192.168.1.10:4445) the browser refuses to hand the page your clipboard at all, so right-click is left alone and opens the browser's own menu, with its Paste entry, instead. The keyboard paste works on both, because there the text arrives with the keypress rather than being read out of the clipboard — as does any other browser paste action, including paste-as-plain-text, since terminal input is plain text either way. A multi-line paste goes in as one block rather than as separate lines, so a pasted command is not submitted at its first newline.

Copying from inside a full-screen program. A program with its own copy key — tmux copy-mode, Neovim, lazygit, a pager — cannot reach your laptop's clipboard directly, so it asks the terminal to do it for it. Browserland can honour that request, but it is off by default and you turn it on per host, under Control Panel → that host's tab → Input → Clipboard (OSC 52). The reason it is off is that everything downstream of the terminal can send this request: not just the program you are using, but a cat of a hostile file, a dependency's build output, or an SSH session to a machine you don't own — and the clipboard it would write is on the computer you are sitting at, not on the remote host. Enabling it for your own broker is a small step; enabling it for a box you don't control is a real one, which is why each host is a separate switch. Editing a host's URL turns the switch back off, and so does switching a host between direct and from server, or re-pairing it (see Hosts-and-Multi-Browser). The switch is stored in this browser only and never travels to a broker, so a broker cannot turn it on for itself.

Once it is on, a copy still needs the page to be on https or localhost, the window focused, and the copy to have followed something you actually did in the front terminal — a copy request that arrives while you are in another tab is dropped. Every refusal says so, and so does every accepted copy, naming the terminal it came from. Copies are capped at 1 MiB and are refused whole rather than truncated. A few deliberate limits worth knowing: text that is not valid UTF-8, or that contains control characters, is refused rather than silently mangled; in Neovim "+y works but "*y does not, because the browser has one clipboard and no separate X11 primary selection to write; and a program can never read your clipboard this way — that request is refused outright and is not behind any setting. tmux emits the request out of the box; Neovim needs set clipboard+=unnamedplus with its OSC 52 provider, or an explicit vim.g.clipboard OSC 52 block.

There is also a rate limit: at most 5 accepted copies in any 10 seconds, so a program stuck in a loop cannot hold your clipboard hostage. A host you have switched off may ask again after 60 seconds — the offer is not a once-per-page-load one, or a program emitting OSC 52 at startup would consume it and your own copy ten minutes later would fail in exactly the silence this feature exists to remove.

When a full-screen app grabs the mouse. Apps like lazygit, btop and mc switch mouse reporting on, and from that moment the terminal forwards clicks, drags and the wheel to the app instead of the browser: drag-select stops highlighting anything, and the wheel scrolls the app's own pane. Hold Shift and drag to force a selection anyway — on macOS hold Option instead, because Shift is not the Mac gesture — and Shift+scroll scrolls the terminal rather than the app. Both are taken before the app ever sees them, so they work no matter what it has enabled. (Shift+scroll only has somewhere to go if there is scrollback: an app drawing on the alternate screen, which most full-screen ones do, has none, so there its own scroll keys are what you want.) Plain Ctrl+C keeps its usual meaning and goes to the app — that is the point, it interrupts — which is exactly why the copy chord is Ctrl+Shift+C; pasting is unaffected, because that is the browser's own shortcut rather than a key the app ever sees. The Mouse mode chip mod is on by default, so a 🖱 appears in the window's title bar for exactly as long as mouse reporting is on, with the escape gesture in its tooltip. (You can turn it off under Control Panel → Mods.)

Default bindings

The table below lists every bindable action and its default binding. Rebind any of them as described above.

Action label	Default binding
Focus column left	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowLeft
Focus column right	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowRight
Move column left	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+ArrowLeft
Move column right	Ctrl+Alt+Shift+ArrowRight
Previous workspace	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowUp
Next workspace	Ctrl+Alt+ArrowDown
Go to workspace 1	Ctrl+Alt+1
Go to workspace 2	Ctrl+Alt+2
Go to workspace 3	Ctrl+Alt+3
Go to workspace 4	Ctrl+Alt+4
Go to workspace 5	Ctrl+Alt+5
Move workspace left	(unbound by default)
Move workspace right	(unbound by default)
New terminal	Ctrl+Alt+Enter
Toggle tiling mode	Ctrl+Alt+t
Close focused window	Ctrl+Alt+w
Minimize focused window	Ctrl+Alt+m
Toggle fullscreen	Ctrl+Alt+f
Open control panel	Ctrl+Alt+p
Toggle help	(unbound by default)
Open terminal in new window	(unbound by default)
Fit focused window to this screen	(unbound by default)
Fit all windows to this screen	(unbound by default)

What the actions do

The default bindings are listed above; in the in-app guide, the live Keyboard shortcuts entries show what each action is bound to right now. The notes below group the actions so you know where each one applies.

Columns (tiling mode)

Focus column left/right and move column left/right shift your focus and your columns along the tiling strip. They apply when you are in tiling mode. See Columns and Widths for width presets and how columns work, and Window Modes for switching into tiling mode.

Workspaces

Previous/next workspace step through your virtual desktops; the "Go to workspace 1–5" actions jump straight to that numbered pager entry (one that is a stack opens its list instead). Move workspace left/right move the workspace you are on one place in the pager (within its stack, if it is in one); both are unbound by default. See Workspaces for the pager and sending windows between desktops.

These nine come from the Workspaces mod (enabled by default), so they leave this list if you turn it off — and your bindings for them come back untouched when you turn it back on.

Windows

New terminal launches the local broker's default profile; on a broker with terminals off (terminals: false) it opens a Cannot launch notice (hosts no terminals (terminals: false) — launch on another host) instead. Close focused window and Minimize focused window act on the front window. Open terminal in new window moves the front terminal into a browser window of its own (see Window-Types). It is unbound by default; once you bind it, the key press counts as the click the browser requires before it opens a new window, so it works just like the menu item. It needs an https or localhost page. Inside that separate window the desktop shortcuts (new terminal, tiling, column focus and moves, control panel, minimize, close, and the workspace keys) do nothing, and the key goes to the terminal instead. Fit focused window to this screen and Fit all windows to this screen give terminals this screen's size back (see Context-Menus); both are unbound by default.

App-wide

Toggle tiling mode switches between floating and tiling (see Window Modes). Toggle fullscreen, Open control panel, and Toggle help round out the global actions — Toggle help is unbound until you assign it a combo. Toggle help comes from the Help mod, so it leaves the list if you turn Help off.

See also

• Getting Started — first steps with the desktop
• Window Modes — floating vs. tiling and the tiling strip
• Columns and Widths — tiling columns, widths, and focus
• Workspaces — virtual desktops and the pager