Keyboard shortcuts

Every default shortcut in TermHQ, how to rebind them, and how conflicts with terminal programs are resolved.

On macOS, ⌘ replaces Ctrl in every shortcut below — with one deliberate exception, dictation, which is Ctrl+Alt+Space on both. On macOS Ctrl belongs to the shell: Ctrl+F and Ctrl+B are readline’s forward-char and backward-char, so binding them app-side would swallow keys the terminal is supposed to receive.

Most of the app-level chords are three keys rather than two. That is not padding: the single-Ctrl versions nearly all belong to the shell — Ctrl+C is the interrupt, Ctrl+D is EOF, Ctrl+S freezes output, Ctrl+L clears the screen — and no Ctrl+Shift+letter is a distinct control code.

Terminals and panes

Ctrl+J and Ctrl+Shift+J pair on purpose: J opens a terminal, Shift+J opens one like this one. B is for browser and E for editor, with Shift keeping them separate from other actions. On Windows, for example, plain Ctrl+B toggles the sidebar, but Vim also uses it to page backward in normal mode.

Connect via SSH opens the SSH picker once SSH is turned on in Settings → SSH → SSH connections — see SSH connections. Show recently closed panes opens the status bar’s list of panes still inside their undo window, with the keyboard on its first row. Rename the focused pane opens the pane’s name for editing; an empty name brings back the automatic one. Find follows where you are: over a terminal it opens that pane’s find bar, and when you were last in the Files panel it searches file and folder names.

On macOS, ⌘+W closes what it points at: the tab in a focused editor, otherwise the focused pane — through the same close as Delete focused terminal, so a closed terminal can still come back with Undo close. Only when no pane is left on the grid does it close the window.

Layout

Focus movement is geometric — it steps to the nearest pane in that direction, preferring one that shares an edge, so focus follows what your eye sees rather than the order panes were opened. In Columns layout only left and right apply.

Jump to the newest waiting pane goes to the pane that most recently went quiet while you were looking elsewhere — the first entry in the status bar’s waiting list — bringing it back from the shelf, or out from behind a maximized pane, if it has to. See When a pane needs your attention. Focus the previous pane is the way back after a jump: it returns to the pane that had focus before this one.

Maximize focused pane fills the grid with one pane, and the same chord restores the grid; a double-click on a pane’s header does the same. Switch between Grid and Columns flips the layout and keeps the panes in the order you read them, Reset pane sizes puts every dragged row and column back to an even share, and Restore all stashed panes and Close all stashed panes act on the whole shelf — restoring asks first when it would leave every pane very small, and closing always asks.

Navigation

The split between the two P chords follows VS Code’s: Ctrl+Shift+P is the palette of every action by name, Ctrl+P is quick-open — here, Settings with the search box already focused, so you type the setting you want instead of hunting categories. Both toggle: the same chord again closes what it opened.

The palette opens more than actions. Beside them it lists your favorites, your shells, the agents it found (Run and the agent’s name), your other workspaces, themes and every Settings page — and your saved and recent SSH connections while SSH is on. With nothing typed they sit under headings, with what you ran last first.

The two numbered pickers are deliberately two strokes rather than ten chords, which keeps the digits free the rest of the time. While one is armed, a card lists the numbered entries so the mapping is never guesswork; the agent card’s title names the terminal the command will be typed into. Both the number row and numeric keypad work in the agent and favorite pickers, including 0 for the tenth entry. Esc cancels, and any other key cancels and then does what it normally does.

The global Worktrees view is also available from the command palette and its status-bar item.

The Git actions have no default shortcut: Git: Open the Git panel, Git: Open History, Git: View File History, Git: Commit, Git: Stage All Changes, Git: Unstage All Changes, Git: Fetch, Git: Pull, Git: Push, Git: Switch Branch, Git: Stash Changes and Git: Refresh. Run them from the command palette, or give the ones you use a chord under the Source Control heading in Settings → Shortcuts. See Source Control.

In a pane

A plain click on a link only focuses the pane or starts a selection; hover one and a hint says how to open it. On macOS the find bar’s toggles are Option+C, W and R. Ctrl+F on a pane whose find bar is already open puts the keyboard back in it.

On a terminal, a right-click on the header opens the pane’s menu instead — Rename…, Copy path, Reveal in File Explorer (Finder on macOS), the header’s buttons by name, and Close. F2 never renames from inside the terminal itself, where it belongs to the program.

In the Files panel

With a row focused (click one, or Tab into the tree):

Inside a row’s menu, a shell row (“Open in PowerShell” and the like) opens its agent flyout with →, a right-click or the chevron at its edge, and ← or Esc closes it.

In menus

Every menu takes the keyboard the same way: ↑ ↓, Home and End move between rows, Enter picks one, Esc closes the menu, and a letter jumps to the next row that starts with it — press it again for the one after.

Zoom

This is text size in one pane, not that pane’s share of the grid — for the latter, see Maximize above. After each step a terminal pane shows its new size for a moment, with the chord that resets it: 15 px · Ctrl+0 resets. Settings → Terminal → Zoom controls turns the wheel and the pinch off; the keys keep working.

Editing

Voice

The one chord that does not move to ⌘ on macOS: ⌘+Alt+Space is Finder’s search window, while Ctrl+Alt+Space collides with nothing a shell wants. It dictates into the focused terminal, or into the text field you are typing in.

Hold to talk is a hold, not a chord, so it lives in Settings → Voice rather than here: turn it on there and set its key by pressing it — any single key, Right Ctrl included. See Dictation.

Why Ctrl+C does two things

In a terminal, Ctrl+C means “interrupt”, and that meaning cannot be given away — it is how you stop a runaway process. But when text is selected, “interrupt” is almost never what you meant.

So TermHQ copies when there is a selection and interrupts when there is not. This is what Windows Terminal does, and it is safe because copying clears the selection: a Ctrl+C that copies when you meant to interrupt costs one extra keypress and never more, because the next one finds nothing selected.

Ctrl+Shift+C is the unconditional copy, and the one you can rebind. The plain-Ctrl rule is off on macOS, where ⌘+C already copies, and off in ultra focus.

Rebinding

Settings → Shortcuts lists every action with its current chord, under six headings — Open panes, Source Control, Terminals, Focus & layout, Arrange without the mode, App — so you find one by what it does rather than by scanning all of them. Search filters across every group.

Click a row and press the combination you want. To leave an action with no shortcut at all, use the slashed-key button that appears beside the chord while you are recording — Backspace does the same thing, but only if you already knew that, and while recording every other key means “use this one”. Only your overrides are stored — anything you have not touched follows the default, so defaults can improve between versions without overwriting your choices.

Recording stops if you leave the list — switching category, typing in the search box, or closing Settings — so a recording you walked away from can never land on a row you are no longer looking at.

A chord can belong to exactly one action, so taking an occupied one asks first: a confirm card names the action that currently holds it and says it will be left unassigned. Per-row reset works the same way in reverse — if that action’s default has since been given to something else, resetting tells you whose chord it is taking back. Once anything differs from the defaults, the section ends with a count and a Reset all shortcuts button.

An action you have unassigned is still listed in the command palette and still runnable from it, so dropping a chord never costs you the command.

The palette also says when an action cannot do anything right now and why — only one pane in the grid beside Arrange pane, voice is off in Settings beside Voice dictation, the focused pane is an editor, not a terminal beside the ones that need a shell. Those rows are dimmed but still listed and still runnable, because the palette is how you find an action in the first place, and hiding one teaches you nothing about what it needs.

A chord gets the same treatment. When its action has nothing to do right now, TermHQ does not swallow the key: it goes on to the focused pane, where it may mean something to the program running there.

Three actions want a terminal

Running an agent by number and voice dictation type into a shell, and Copy selection copies a terminal’s selection, so all three want a terminal focused rather than just any pane. The first two also need that terminal’s shell to be running — a terminal whose shell has ended refuses them — and the agent picker refuses an SSH pane as well, because the agents it offers are the ones found on this machine and the command would run on the far host.

Dictation can also start in one of TermHQ’s own text fields — the commit box, a search box, a browser pane’s address bar — and types there. See Dictation.

With an editor or a browser pane in front, all three refuse: the palette says which kind of pane is in the way, and the chord goes on to the pane rather than doing something that could not work.

You are not left without a way to copy: an editor and a browser each handle Ctrl+C themselves.

Seeing what a key did

Settings → Shortcuts → Show shortcuts on screen (off by default) puts a card on screen for each chord you press, saying what the app did with it: ran an action, nothing bound, the editor kept it (or it was the editor’s own key), ultra focus passed it through, the action could not run — with the reason the palette would give — or a text field kept it (typing — … not run).

It is there for demos and screen recordings, and for the moment a chord seems to do nothing and you want to know which of those it was. Only keys held with Ctrl, Alt or ⌘ and the function keys are ever shown — it cannot display your typing.

What is not rebindable

A few behaviors answer to terminal state or to the mouse rather than to a chord, so they are not keymap entries: paste (Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Shift+V / Shift+Insert), right-click, and Ctrl+scroll zoom.

The two mouse behaviors have settings of their own instead. Settings → Terminal → Right-click in a terminal chooses between a menu — Copy, Paste, Select all, Clear and Find — and copying the selection, or pasting when there is none; Automatic, the default, is the menu on macOS and copy-or-paste on Windows. Settings → Terminal → Zoom controls turns Ctrl+scroll zoom off.

Bare arrow keys cannot be keymap entries either — they would break every TUI — so TermHQ uses them only where you have gone on purpose: arrange mode, the stash shelf, a gutter between panes that you have tabbed to (the arrows move it, Enter evens it up), the status bar’s lists of closed and waiting panes, and menus. None of them is a standing binding.

Four defaults that take a key from your shell

Most of TermHQ’s shortcuts are chosen so the shell loses nothing. Four are not, and it is better that you hear it here than discover it:

Ctrl+Shift+←/→ also costs PowerShell its word-selection. That one was a deliberate trade: pane navigation that works in every shell, against one editing convenience in one shell.

None of this applies on macOS. There every shortcut hangs off ⌘, which never reaches the terminal at all, so there is nothing to collide.

Any of them can be rebound or cleared in Settings → Shortcuts, per machine.

When a text field or a dialog has focus

TermHQ’s own text fields — a browser pane’s address bar, the commit box, a search box, a pane’s name while you rename it — and anything under an open dialog get their keys first. There only the launchers run: the command palette, Settings, Workspaces, Connect via SSH, Worktrees, and voice dictation, which types into the field you are in. Every other chord is left to the field or the dialog, so Ctrl+Shift+Z in the commit box does not maximize the pane behind it, and Ctrl+Shift+← / → select by word as they do in any text box.

A terminal’s input and an editor’s are not text fields in this sense. They keep their keys by the rules on the rest of this page.

When an editor pane has focus

An editor pane binds keys of its own, and they are bound in the pane so your shell loses nothing: Ctrl+S still freezes a terminal’s output and Ctrl+W still deletes a word everywhere else. The full set is on the editor page.

Three app chords also step aside for the editor, because the editor binds them to something you are more likely to want while typing:

On macOS, ⌘+Shift+Z joins them — there it is the standard redo, so redo wins over Maximize. On Windows redo also has Ctrl+Y, so Maximize keeps its chord.

The pane-focus chords stay in the editor too: there Ctrl+Shift+arrow selects text, as it does in any text box.

Settings → Editor → Editing shortcuts stay in the editor turns the yielding off and runs the app action everywhere, pane focus included. Ultra focus hands over every key regardless.

When a browser pane has focus

A browser pane is a real web page, and a web page wants keys too. On Windows and macOS, TermHQ’s chords are taken before the page sees them, so pane focus, arrange mode, stash, close, maximize and the pickers all work with a page focused exactly as they do with a terminal focused. Afterwards the keyboard goes where the result needs it — back into the page, or into the app for arrange mode’s arrows and a picker’s digits.

A short list is deliberately left to the page:

On macOS the first two rows are the pane’s instead. The page’s engine shows no find bar of its own there, so ⌘+F opens the pane’s find bar, and ⌘+= / - / 0 still zoom the page, with TermHQ doing the zooming. macOS also gives a focused page the usual browser keys, unless your keymap has claimed them: ⌘+L for the address bar, ⌘+[ and ⌘+] for back and forward, ⌘+R to reload.

The address bar is one of TermHQ’s own text fields, so while you type an address only the launchers run — see When a text field or a dialog has focus.

Ultra focus (Ctrl+Shift+U) hands a browser pane every key except its own toggle, the same bargain it makes with a terminal.

When a terminal program wants the same key

Terminal programs such as Vim have their own shortcuts, and some collide with TermHQ’s. For example, on Windows, Ctrl+B opens the sidebar instead of paging backward in Vim’s normal mode.

Two ways out:

1. Rebind or clear the TermHQ action in Settings → Shortcuts.
2. Ultra focus (Ctrl+Shift+U) — hands every keystroke to the terminal and turns TermHQ’s shortcuts off. That includes Ctrl+V, which normally pastes, so Vim can receive it to enter visual block mode.

Two things stay TermHQ’s by design even in ultra focus: Ctrl+Shift+V still pastes — it is not a control code, so no TUI can want it — and mouse behaviors are unaffected, so right-click and Ctrl+scroll zoom keep working. Its own chord stays live too, because a mode with no keyboard exit is a trap; a badge appears in the title bar and can be clicked to leave, and the focused pane’s edge breathes in the attention color while the mode is on.

Ultra focus is deliberately not remembered across restarts. A mode that outlives a launch is a mode you can be stuck in without knowing why.