Keyboard and the command palette

Everything below is on Ctrl+Shift, which is what every terminal emulator claims for itself, because bare Ctrl+letter belongs to the shell running inside the pane. On macOS the same set is mirrored onto Cmd+Shift; both work.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Space and an overlay names what the next keystroke can be, grouped one letter per area: p panes, s sessions, w Projects, v views, n notes, t terminal, g Git, d the side panel, f focus, and a few more. So a new terminal is leader, s, n; the pane to the left is leader, p, h. Escape cancels.

A leader is not decoration. Every keystroke after it is a plain keypress that no browser and no window manager competes for, so one reservation buys the whole tree where a flat map would need one per command.

Settings, Input, Keyboard preset. Five ship: swe-mux, tmux, VS Code, Vim-flavoured, and Emacs. Each adds its own prefix and its own letters, and each also keeps the swe-mux leader tree, so choosing one never removes the route to a command that tool has no opinion about. You can pick one during first-time setup too.

swe-mux is an outer shell, so any chord it claims is claimed from whatever runs inside a pane. The tmux preset takes Ctrl+B from a tmux running in a pane; Vim's takes Ctrl+W. Each preset says so before you choose it, and each can be rebound afterwards.

Settings, Input, Keyboard shortcuts. A binding is one to three chords; only the first needs Ctrl, Alt or Meta (or a function key), because everything after it is read while the shortcut is already armed. Shift alone is refused, because it shadows typing.

Chords name the physical key rather than the character your layout produces, so a shortcut means the same key on QWERTY, AZERTY and Dvorak. Overrides are stored in keybindings.json in the data directory, and a binding for a command that was later renamed is migrated forward rather than dropped.

Because on most non-US keyboards AltGr produces exactly Ctrl+Alt. swe-mux used to default to that namespace, which meant a German, French, Polish, Spanish or Nordic user fired application shortcuts while typing ordinary characters. No shipped preset uses it, and choosing one yourself is allowed but says so.

swe-mux deliberately does not intercept the chords a shell or a TUI needs. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+L and their neighbours reach the process, which is why the application's own chords are on Ctrl+Shift rather than bare Ctrl.

Two other layers get there first, and Settings names both. A browser tab keeps Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W and a handful more for itself, while the desktop app hands them to swe-mux - so a shortcut can be live in one and absent in the other, and the editor says which. Your window manager takes more still: on GNOME and KDE, Ctrl+Alt+arrows switch workspace and Ctrl+Alt+T opens a terminal.

The list of chords a browser keeps is a guess about your browser, and browsers disagree. Settings, Input has a short test that measures it on the browser you are actually using, and the measurement overrides the guess. A chord you never test stays untested rather than being recorded as blocked.

The same command registry is bindable to touch gestures in Settings, Input, Touch gestures. Three defaults are worth knowing:

Spoken commands resolve through voice aliases on the ordinary command registry rather than through a parallel list, which is what keeps a command reachable by chord, palette, gesture, and voice without four definitions of it. Voice covers what is deliberately excluded from the spoken set.