Keyboard

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? for the list, or the key icon in the top bar — which appears only on screens wide enough to have a keyboard attached, since it is no use on a phone. Settings has a way in too. Everything on the list can be changed.

The rule that shapes all of them

A terminal owns the keyboard. Anything typed while a session has the focus belongs to that session — stealing even one key from tmux would be worse than having no shortcuts at all. So these fire only when the focus is somewhere else: not in a terminal, not in a text box, not in anything you are writing in. The help says so at the top rather than leaving you to wonder why nothing happened.

Two modifiers, and which one says where you are going

They were bare letters once — f for Files, w for Windows — and the rule above was meant to keep them out of the way. It is not enough: plenty of the app is neither a terminal nor a text box (a listing you are reading, a document, the journal), and a letter pressed while looking at one opened a screen you did not ask for.

Ctrl on its own was the next attempt, and it lasted a day. A browser owns nearly every Ctrl+letter there is, and owns them at a level a page cannot argue with: Ctrl+F is find, Ctrl+L is the address bar, Ctrl+E is the search box, Ctrl+1…9 switches tabs. When the terminal has the keyboard — which is most of the time — the browser gets them first.

So the modifier says which question you are asking:

• Ctrl+Alt is the sidebar — the screens down the side, which is a place you go.
• Ctrl+Shift is the desk you are on — a window opened in it, or moving between desks.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift is how the desk is arranged — grid, columns, rows, your own. A third modifier because they are a third kind of thing, and because two are no longer enough: every pair a browser has not taken is one it has.

?	this list — the one bare key, because it is what you press when lost
F11	full screen
Ctrl+Alt+F	Files
Ctrl+Alt+S	Sessions
Ctrl+Alt+W	Windows
Ctrl+Alt+P	Prompts
Ctrl+Alt+Y	System
Ctrl+Alt+,	Settings
Ctrl+Alt+B	show or hide the file sidebar
Ctrl+Shift+E	a new file browser in this desk
Ctrl+Shift+L	the link tray
Ctrl+Shift+Y	the prompts window
Ctrl+Shift+] Ctrl+Shift+[	next and previous desk — the arrows → ← do the same
Ctrl+Shift+1…9	that desk, by its number. Alt+1…9 as well
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G	arrange as a grid
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K	as columns
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J	as rows
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U	back to your own arrangement

C for columns and R for rows are the obvious letters and both are spoken for — Ctrl+Shift+C is the element picker, Ctrl+Shift+R is a hard reload — so J and K, where a vim hand already is.

AltGr was tried and taken out. It is the one modifier no browser has claimed, and it is also not one key — Linux sends AltGraph, Windows sends Ctrl+Alt, some keyboards have none — so reading it meant dropping the ctrl and alt reported alongside it, and an ordinary Ctrl+Alt shortcut could have stopped working on a keyboard where right-Alt is AltGr. It could not be tested either: that modifier cannot be produced by anything except a real key. Three modifiers it is.

Two ways to a desk by number is not indecision: Ctrl+1…9 belongs to the browser's tabs and Ctrl+Shift+1…9 does not, while Alt+1…9 is free nearly everywhere — between them, one of the two works wherever you are. Installed as an app the browser has no tabs to switch and no address bar to focus, and very nearly all of them arrive.

If yours still swallows one, change it: nothing here is fixed.

Four groups, two columns, and a box to search them

The list is grouped the way the scheme is — Everywhere, The sidebar, This desk, Arrangements — because eighteen rows in one column read as eighteen unrelated facts, and four short lists read as a rule you can remember without opening the sheet again. Over 820px it is two columns, with the headings spanning both. The box at the top hides what does not match, headings included, for when you know the word and not the key.

Switching one off

The cross at the end of a row switches that shortcut off: it says off, and the key does nothing until you give it one again — the same cross puts its usual key back. Backspace does it too, while a row is listening.

It stores nothing rather than deleting your choice, and the difference matters: deleting a choice restores the shipped key, which is how a shortcut you thought you had cleared went on firing. Put the original keys back still undoes the lot.

Changing one

Open the list, click the row, and hold the combination you want — the row says press the keys… while it waits, and records what you actually pressed. Nothing to type, no spelling of modifier names, and no way to write down a combination your keyboard cannot produce.

With a modifier held it records the key you pressed, not the character it would have typed. Shift makes E out of e, and Alt composes on some layouts, so a combination stored by its character comes back as ctrl+E — unreadable, and the same thing as Ctrl+E on a keyboard where both make that letter. Held down, it is read off the physical key and Shift is named like any other modifier. Nothing held, nothing changes: ? is ?.

A modifier on its own is not a combination: holding Ctrl fires a key press of its own, and taking it would record ctrl+control and stop listening before you had reached the letter you meant. So it waits for the whole thing.

Backspace on a row clears its shortcut, Escape leaves it alone, and Put the original keys back undoes the lot.

Your choices are kept in this browser, like the rest of what a desk knows about itself.