Keybindings

Keybindings

synui's defaults. Override in ~/.config/synui/synuirc or /etc/synui/synuirc.

Lost? Super+C opens the control panel — the front door, listing every shortcut, generated from the live bind table so it can't drift from reality. Tapping Super alone opens the start menu.

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Launching and the AI

Key	Action
Super (tapped alone)	Start menu (the bar's SYNAPSE badge)
Super+/	Shortcut palette — every binding on this page, searchable
Super+C	Control panel — every shortcut plus the settings
Super+Return	Open a terminal
Super+Space	Application launcher (rofi)
Super+=	Command bar
Super+Backspace	Ask the AI
Super+A	Neural activity overlay (live synapd feed)
Super+Escape	Menu

Super+Space is rofi, the application launcher — it lists your installed apps and starts one. It is not a toggle like the panels below it: pressing the key again while rofi is up does nothing (rofi single-instances), and clicking away does not dismiss it either, because rofi's Wayland backend cannot see clicks outside its own surface. Escape closes it. A brief flicker as it opens is upstream's — it detects the monitor scale late.

The command bar (the one that takes synsh intents and shows command output) used to be here and is now Super+=, next to Super+Backspace so the two AI popups sit side by side on the keyboard.

Want them the other way round? Control panel (Super+C) ▸ Desktop ▸ Super+Space opens flips the pair — whichever one you pick gets Super+Space, the other gets Super+=. super_space = launcher or super_space = cmdbar in synuirc is the same switch. If you rebind either key yourself with a bind = line, the setting leaves both alone and your bind wins.

rofi follows the desktop theme — a theme switch rewrites its palette, and since rofi starts fresh on every keypress it picks the new colours up immediately.

Super+/ is the one to remember if you remember nothing else. It is the same list as this page, filtered as you type, built from the live bind table — so it includes anything you have rebound and cannot go stale. It also answers to Super+?: on a US layout that is Super+Shift+/, and the keyboard hands the compositor a different symbol when Shift is down, so both are bound to the same action. Reach for it either way.

Windows

Key	Action
Super+Q / Super+Shift+Q	Close window / quit compositor
Super+J / Super+K	Focus next / previous
Super+Shift+J / Super+Shift+K	Move window up / down the stack
Alt+Tab / Alt+Shift+Tab	Most-recently-used cycle — "the window I was just in"
Super+H / Super+Shift+L	Shrink / grow the master area — and a niri column's width
Super+, / Super+.	niri only — pull the window into the column on its left / push it back out into its own column
Super+F / Super+M / Super+N	Float / maximize / minimize
Super+Shift+N	Restore the last minimized window
Super+Shift+F	Fullscreen (forces it — for games that only do "borderless")
Super+Shift+D	Toggle window decorations (titlebar)
Super+Tab	Cycle this desktop's layout — tiling → floating → monocle → AI → niri
Super+Shift+T	Retile — back to tiling, and put every window back in it
Super+O / Super+Shift+O	Move window to next / previous monitor
Super+1–9	Switch workspace
Super+Shift+1–9	Move window to workspace

Super+J/K walk stacking order; Alt+Tab walks MRU. That difference is the whole reason both exist.

Super+Tab does not switch windows — it switches layouts. The five and what each one does are in The Desktop → Layouts.

Super+, and Super+. are the only two keys that do nothing on four of the five layouts, and that is not a bug: the other four have no columns to move a window between. On niri they are the whole point — everything else is walking along the strip, which Super+Shift+J/K already does.

Look and feel

Key	Action
Super+T	Theme manager
Super+W / Super+Shift+W	Wallpaper picker / reload wallpaper (Tab scopes it to one monitor, m cycles the scaling mode)
Super+E	Visual effects panel (scanline / curvature / aberration / glitch / phosphor)
Super+Shift+P	Cursor theme picker ("P for pointer")
Super+S	Event sounds
Super+Shift+A	Desktop widgets manager
Super+Shift+B	Night light ("blue light")

See The Desktop, Wallpapers, Window Effects, Cursor Themes, Sound Themes.

System

Key	Action
Super+D	Display settings (p sets the primary output — see below)
Super+I	Network / Wi-Fi
Super+B	Bluetooth
Super+P	Power saving panel
Super+L	Lock screen
Super+G	Game mode
Super+V	Clipboard history
Super+R	News feed (R for RSS — Super+N is minimize)
Super+Shift+R	Start / stop screen recording
Ctrl+Alt+Delete	Task manager (processes, CPU/RAM/GPU)
Super+Shift+C	Cat mode 🐈

Super+T used to be the task manager. It is the theme manager now — the task manager had two binds and needed one, and Ctrl+Alt+Delete is the one everybody already reaches for. (logind's Ctrl+Alt+Del handling is a VT/console thing, so inside a Wayland session the key reaches the compositor.)

Media and hardware keys

Bare keys, no modifier — they are dedicated keys and nothing else claims them.

Key	Action
XF86AudioRaiseVolume / LowerVolume / Mute	Volume, with an OSD
XF86MonBrightnessUp / Down	Backlight

Bare-key binds matter for hardware like USB volume knobs, which report plain KEY_VOLUMEUP/KEY_VOLUMEDOWN/KEY_MUTE with no modifier held. Before synui had audio binds, those events reached the bind table and matched nothing.

Screenshots

Key	Action
Print	Screenshot the monitor you're on
Shift+Print / Super+Shift+S	Screenshot an area (drag it out)
Ctrl+Print	Screenshot every monitor at once

Screenshots land in ~/Pictures/Screenshots and on the clipboard, so you can paste one straight into a chat without opening the file.

Note: Print arrives as Sys_Req when Alt is held — that's an X11ism, not a bug.

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Rebinding

bind = super+shift+z spawn my-script

in synuirc. Actions are the names the default table uses (term, cmdbar, theme, sounds, widgets, cursor, alt_tab, …), plus spawn <command>.

No comma. The line is split on the first whitespace — everything before it is the combo, everything after is the action and its argument. A trailing comma becomes part of the key name, and z, is not a keysym, so the whole bind is dropped (synui logs bind: bad key).

Punctuation keys are spelled by name, because the combo is split on + and a literal = or + cannot be the key. Use the XKB keysym name: equal, minus, comma, period, slash. The command bar's default is bind = super+equal cmdbar — super+= does not work.

A duplicate combo is not a conflict anyone sees — it is the older feature silently going dead. handle_keybinding takes the first match. synui logs DUPLICATE default bind at startup for exactly this reason: adding night_light on super+shift+n once killed minimize_restore, and it only turned up because the table happened to get grepped.

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Two things that will confuse you if you hit them

Super+Shift+F exists because "fullscreen" is a lie. Some games (Doom KEX with v_windowmode=1) are borderless windowed and never send _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN, so the compositor correctly tiles them and you assume synui is broken. Either set the game to true fullscreen (v_windowmode=2) or force it with Super+Shift+F.

Set a primary output if games open on the wrong monitor. Xwayland used to mark no primary output, so SDL fell back to connector order and games opened on whichever panel happened to be first. Super+D → p, or primary=1 in outputs.conf.

See also: synui, Commands.