Keyboard shortcuts

Audience. Daily user.

At a glance

Area	Bindings	Configurable?
Application menu (File / View)	13 set by condash, plus 11 OS defaults	no
Dashboard global	3	no
Project cards	6	no
Note modal	5	no
Terminal — pane	4	yes (terminal.*)
Terminal — xterm	4 xterm-level (+ 2 pane-level re-listed for context)	no

"Set by condash" means an explicit accelerator: in src/main/menu.ts. The 11 OS defaults come from Electron role: menu items — the whole Edit menu plus zoom / devtools / fullscreen — and carry whatever binding the platform assigns; they are listed below but counted separately because condash does not choose them.

Application menu

The OS menu bar carries every system-level shortcut. Each item also dispatches an internal MenuCommand (see src/shared/api.ts MenuCommand) so the renderer can hook the same intent without going through the menu.

Menu	Item	Shortcut	What it does
File	Open…	Ctrl+O / Cmd+O	Reopen the conception folder picker.
File	Open Recent ▸	—	Submenu of the last five conception paths, plus Clear menu. Picking one switches the active conception immediately.
File	Open conception directory	—	Reveal the current conception in the OS file manager.
File	Settings	Ctrl+, / Cmd+,	Open the Settings modal.
File	Search…	Ctrl+Shift+F / Cmd+Shift+F	Open the global search modal.
File	New project…	Ctrl+N / Cmd+N	Open the new-project modal.
File	Quit	(no accelerator)	Trigger the quit-confirm flow.
View	Show Projects	—	Toggle the Projects pane on the left edge.
View	Show Code	Ctrl+Shift+C / Cmd+Shift+C	Show the Code pane in the working slot.
View	Show Knowledge	Ctrl+Shift+K / Cmd+Shift+K	Show the Knowledge pane in the working slot.
View	Show Resources	Ctrl+R / Cmd+R	Show the Resources pane in the working slot.
View	Show Skills	Ctrl+L / Cmd+L	Show the Skills pane in the working slot.
View	Show Logs	Ctrl+Shift+L / Cmd+Shift+L	Show the Logs pane (per-session terminal log viewer) in the working slot.
View	Show Dashboard	Ctrl+Shift+D / Cmd+Shift+D	Swap the bottom band to the Dashboard body (live terminal-tab summaries) — also selectable from the always-first Dashboard tab in the terminal strip.
View	Hide working surface	—	Hide whichever pane (Code / Knowledge / Resources / Skills / Logs) is in the working slot.
View	Show Terminal	Ctrl+` / Cmd+`	Toggle the Terminal pane at the bottom.
View	Refresh	F5	Drop the git-status TTL cache and re-read every list.
View	Reload window	Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R	Reload the renderer (browser-style hard reload). The bare Ctrl+R slot is taken by Show Resources.
Help	About / Welcome / Quick start / …	—	Open the matching docs/ page in the in-app Help modal.

The View toggles round-trip through getLayout / setLayout — see Config files — LayoutState. The visible state is kept in sync with the menu's checkbox items.

OS-default menu items

Eleven further items are Electron role: entries. condash sets no accelerator on any of them, so each item's label and binding come from Electron's per-platform defaults rather than from condash — which is why they are not listed with the accelerators above and why this page does not spell them out.

Menu	Roles
Edit	undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, selectAll
View	toggleDevTools, resetZoom, zoomIn, zoomOut, togglefullscreen

The Edit-menu roles act on whatever the OS considers focused. They are not the terminal's copy/paste path — a focused xterm handles Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V itself (see xterm-level), because Electron's paste role does not reliably deliver a paste event to xterm's hidden textarea.

The activity rail

Every View toggle above has a pointer twin on the activity rail down the left edge. Top to bottom: Projects · Tasks · Deliverables · Performance, a divider, then Code · Knowledge · Resources · Skills · Logs. The first group fills the left band; the second fills the right working slot. The active item is highlighted. Hovering shows the item's name; the five working-slot items add their shortcut in brackets, and the four left-band items have no keyboard shortcut, so their tooltip is the bare name.

Clicking the item that is already active hides its pane — the same tristate the Show … menu items have.

Dashboard global

Shortcut	Action	Configurable
Ctrl+K / Cmd+K	Open the global search modal (same effect as Ctrl+Shift+F).	no
Escape	Close the topmost modal	no
?	Toggle the keyboard-shortcut cheat-sheet overlay	no

Item focus and pane switching are pointer-driven — there is no "switch pane" shortcut. The search modal takes over the keyboard once it opens.

Project cards

Each project card in the Projects pane is keyboard-focusable. Tab into a card (or click it once), then drive its status with the digit shortcuts. The focus ring shows which card the next keypress will affect.

Shortcut	Action
Tab / Shift+Tab	Move focus between cards (and other focusable elements).
Ctrl+1 / Cmd+1	Set the focused card's status to now.
Ctrl+2 / Cmd+2	Set the focused card's status to review.
Ctrl+3 / Cmd+3	Set the focused card's status to later.
Ctrl+4 / Cmd+4	Set the focused card's status to backlog.
Ctrl+5 / Cmd+5	Set the focused card's status to done.

The digit-to-status mapping follows KNOWN_STATUSES in src/shared/types/project.ts — 1..N maps to position 0..N-1. Pressing a digit equal to the card's current status is a no-op.

The shortcut yields to text inputs, textareas, contenteditable surfaces, the embedded xterm, and the CodeMirror editor — typing Ctrl+1 in the search modal or in a note's edit pane never steals it from the focused element.

Status changes via the keyboard go through the same setStatus mutation as the drag-drop path, so they fire the timeline Closed. / Reopened. entries on done-edges and surface the same out-of-tree branch warning when the project's worktree disagrees with the new status.

Note modal

Active whenever a note preview (.note-modal.open) is on screen. Handled at capture phase so xterm / CodeMirror can't swallow them.

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+F / Cmd+F	Open the in-note Find bar (view mode only — edit mode falls through to the browser's native find)
Ctrl+E / Cmd+E	Toggle between view and the last-used edit mode
Escape	Close the Find bar if open, else close the modal
Enter / Shift+Enter / F3	Step to next / previous match (when the Find bar is focused)

Inside the CodeMirror edit pane:

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+S / Cmd+S	Save (atomic overwrite via the writeNote IPC verb). Refuses if the file has drifted on disk.

Embedded terminal — pane-level

These live at the dashboard level and can fire from outside the terminal pane (e.g. toggle it open from anywhere). Configurable via the terminal: block, which is a personal/per-machine key — it lives in the global settings.json only, and a conception file that carries it is rejected by the strict schema. Shortcut strings follow the KeyboardEvent.key convention — modifiers are Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Meta.

Default	Action	Config key
Ctrl+`	Toggle the terminal pane	terminal.shortcut
Ctrl+Shift+V	Paste the path of the newest screenshot (see below)	terminal.screenshot_paste_shortcut
Ctrl+Left	Move the active tab to the left pane	terminal.move_tab_left_shortcut
Ctrl+Right	Move the active tab to the right pane	terminal.move_tab_right_shortcut

Shortcut spec grammar:

shortcut      := modifier+ key
modifier      := "Ctrl" | "Shift" | "Alt" | "Meta"
key           := single char | KeyboardEvent.key name (e.g. "Enter", "`")

All parts are joined with +. Examples: Ctrl+T, Ctrl+Shift+F, Alt+1, Ctrl+`.

All four are handled by one document-level keydown listener registered in the capture phase, so they run before xterm's own textarea listener rather than being swallowed by a focused terminal. Two nuances:

• The pane toggle is the only shortcut that fires unconditionally — from inside an <input>, the CodeMirror editor, or the active xterm alike.
• Screenshot-paste also wins inside the xterm (that's the surface you want to paste into) and additionally calls stopPropagation(), which is what suppresses xterm's own built-in Ctrl+Shift+V clipboard paste from overwriting the path.

The ? overlay, Ctrl+K, and the two move-tab shortcuts yield to any editable target instead. Move-tab additionally requires the terminal pane to be open.

Screenshot-paste flow

When terminal.screenshot_paste_shortcut fires:

1. Main process: the termLatestScreenshot(dir) IPC verb scans the top level of terminal.screenshot_dir and returns the most recently modified file (any extension — it does not filter on image types). There is no HTTP route.
2. Renderer: the returned path is written to the active column's live tab, addressed by session id rather than by whatever holds focus — no Enter appended. You confirm. If the bottom band is showing the Dashboard, the terminal body comes up once the path has landed, so you can see it.
3. If terminal.screenshot_dir is unset, or the directory is missing or empty, a transient toast surfaces the reason. So does a refusal: with no live tab in the active column — it is empty, or the tab there has exited — nothing is pasted and the toast says so. The shortcut never opens a shell for you; it is key-repeatable, and holding it would open one per repeat.

See using the embedded terminal.

Embedded terminal — xterm-level

These live inside xterm's attachCustomKeyEventHandler and only fire while a terminal tab has focus. Not configurable — they match GNOME Terminal / Ghostty conventions.

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+C	Copy the selection if there is one; otherwise send SIGINT to the foreground process.
Ctrl+V	Paste from the system clipboard. The clipboard is read in the main process (clipboardReadText IPC) and fed through term.paste(), which applies bracketed-paste wrapping when the program has that mode on.
Ctrl+Shift+V	Paste the path of the newest screenshot — intercepted by the screenshot-paste handler unless rebound.
Ctrl+F	Open the in-tab search bar (xterm search addon). Esc closes it.
Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down	Jump to the previous / next OSC 133 prompt boundary in the active tab. Requires the shell integration snippet; without it, the keys fall through to the shell.

Copy writes the system clipboard through the browser's native navigator.clipboard API. Paste reads it through the clipboardReadText IPC (main-process Electron clipboard), because navigator.clipboard.readText() is permission-gated and unreliable in the renderer. There is no HTTP endpoint.

There is no Ctrl+Shift+C "always copy". The xterm handler requires !shiftKey, and the accelerator belongs to View → Show Code, which wins globally. Use Ctrl+C with a selection — it copies and clears the selection, and only falls through to SIGINT when nothing is selected.

Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right are not intercepted here either. The move-tab shortcuts live in the pane-level (global) handler above, which yields to anything inside .xterm-host — so while a terminal tab has focus they fall through to the shell, where word-wise cursor motion keeps working, and they move a tab only when focus is elsewhere in the app. See Input focus rules below and using the embedded terminal.

Input focus rules

"Editable" means the event target sits inside an <input>, a <textarea>, a contenteditable element, the CodeMirror editor (.cm-editor), or the embedded xterm (.xterm-host). Whether a shortcut yields to one is decided per cluster, not globally:

Cluster	Inside an editable target
Terminal-pane toggle (Ctrl+`)	Fires anyway — always wins, deliberately.
Screenshot-paste (Ctrl+Shift+V)	Fires anyway when the terminal pane is open, and suppresses xterm's own paste.
? overlay, Ctrl+K search, move-tab	Yields.
Project-card digits (Ctrl+1..5)	Yields when the target is an <input> / <textarea> / <select> / contenteditable, and it additionally ignores any keypress carrying Alt or Shift.
Note-modal shortcuts	Handled at capture phase inside the modal, so xterm / CodeMirror cannot swallow them.

The application-menu accelerators are owned by the OS menu bar and are unaffected by renderer focus entirely.

Reloading shortcut changes

terminal shortcut changes saved from File → Settings → Terminal take effect live — the renderer re-reads the prefs and reparses the shortcut specs, no restart.

A hand-edit of the global settings.json does not. condash's chokidar watcher is rooted at the conception directory, so it never sees that file; the prefs reload is driven by a config event on .condash/settings.json (or by the modal's own save). Reopen the conception — or just save once from the Settings modal — to pick a hand-edit up. Separately, workspace_path / worktrees_path / the repositories list need an actual restart whichever way they are edited.