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Panama/config/dot/quickshell/manual/02-the-keyboard.md
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Gabriel Brown 5490fd285d Fold thirty-one settings pages into fifteen categories with tabs
The sidebar was a flat scan of thirty-one rows; now it reads like a
settings app. Multi-subject categories (Input, Network & Sharing,
Applications, Users & Accounts, Privacy & Security, System) carry an
Appearance-style tab strip above the page, drawn by the shell so the
leaf pages themselves are untouched. The taxonomy lives in one new
file, services/SettingsRoutes.qml; the sidebar, the strip, route
validation, search breadcrumbs, and both generators derive from it.

ShellState.settingsPage still holds leaf ids, so every deep link, IPC
call, and search result keeps working — and now lands on the exact
tab. Dictation moves out of Sound onto its own page under Input, with
a handoff back to Sound for the microphone. The strip scrolls when
System's nine tabs outgrow a tiled window. All 161 contracts pass.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ms2FbjQy31TVf3CEvQhGM8
2026-08-23 20:21:31 -04:00

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The keyboard

Press Super + / at any time to see every shortcut this machine has. That list is generated from the live keymap, so it is never out of date, and it includes anything you have rebound.

This chapter is the shape behind that list, which is the part worth learning once.

Three modifiers, three jobs

Modifier Acts on
Super The window you are looking at
Alt Workspaces
Super + Ctrl The layout itself: splitting, floating, swapping
Super + Alt The application you already have open

Almost every shortcut follows from this. Super + H moves focus left. Alt + H moves to the workspace on the left. Super + Ctrl + H swaps the window leftward in the layout.

Directions

H, J, K, L mean left, down, up, right, as they do in vim. The arrow keys work everywhere the letters do, so you never have to learn them if you would rather not.

Add Shift to move the window rather than the focus. Super + Shift + L takes the current window and moves it to the right.

Opening versus going to

Super + T opens a terminal. It opens another one every time, which on a tiling desktop is the normal way to work rather than an accident.

Super + Alt + T goes to a terminal you already have, wherever it is, and opens one only if there is none. The same pair works for the editor, browser, files, calculator and mail.

So the plain key means "give me one" and adding Alt means "take me to the one I have".

The handful worth memorising first

Keys What it does
Super + Space Find and open anything
Super + T Terminal (another one)
Super + Alt + T The terminal you already have
Super + Q Close the window
Super + backtick Every window, every workspace
Super + I Settings
Super + / Every other shortcut

Changing them

Settings has a Keyboard page, under Input, listing every bind, each of which can be reassigned. A rebind moves the shortcut and cannot change what it does, so there is no way to make a key do something unexpected by editing it.