Keyboard shortcuts (every binding, and how to change them)

What it is

Almost every action in Omniscio has a keyboard shortcut. The defaults are documented below — every one is rebindable from Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, and every action can have multiple bindings (up to 25 per action) so you can layer your own shortcuts on top of the defaults instead of replacing them. This now includes the system-wide (OS-level) hotkeys — every global hotkey row and every Quick Launch tab (so the Task tab, for example, can open from Alt+Space and Alt+T and any others you add). Each key is its own removable pill; press Add to record another.

Two layers exist. The app shortcuts (everything in this page) fire while Omniscio is the focused window — they're handled by the renderer's keyboard dispatcher. The global hotkeys (Ctrl+Shift+M to focus the window, Ctrl+Space to open the Quick Launch floating composer, Ctrl+Shift+J for the Omni briefing, Ctrl+Shift+S to open the Quick scratchpad) fire even when Omniscio is in the background or hidden to the tray, because they're registered with the OS via Electron's globalShortcut API. All of the OS-level hotkeys are editable from Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → System-wide (the group pinned at the top of the groups rail, mirrored from their original homes — edits in either location write the same field). That same System-wide group is now the one place every works-anywhere shortcut lives: alongside the core hotkeys (Global, Quick Launch, Omni briefing, KMS window, KMS quick find, Supermail window, Team Chat window, Quick scratchpad) it lists a global-hotkey row for every Quick Launch tab — Calendar (which ships with a Ctrl+Alt+J default), Alarm, Task (which ships with an Alt+Space default), Drip, Bookmark, Search, Ask Omniscio, Team Time, and Email (which ships with an Alt+E default, active only when Quick Email is on) — and one row per saved Quick Email contact. The tab rows mirror Settings → Quick Launch tabs and the contact rows mirror Settings → Quick Email (edits in either location write the same field). The Windows key works as a modifier in every system-wide hotkey — press Win+Shift+K (or Win+Alt+A, Win+Ctrl+Alt+anything, Win+J, …) in any hotkey box and it is saved and shown as Win+Shift+K (stored as Super+Shift+K), never quietly turned into Ctrl. Windows keeps some Win combinations for itself (Win+V, Win+E, Win+L, Win+A, Win+1–9 and most Win+letter keys), and those never reach Omniscio at all — pressing one in the hotkey box just runs the Windows action. Pick a combination with an extra modifier (Shift, Alt, or Ctrl+Alt) and it is almost always free. On macOS the Cmd key still records as Cmd. While a hotkey box is recording, Omniscio's own app shortcuts stand down, so the combination you press is captured instead of also triggering an app action. When two enabled global hotkeys are bound to the same combination, each shows an amber "Also used by …" note so you never set one that silently loses the slot. And a system-wide hotkey can no longer fail silently: if Windows or another app already owns the combination when Omniscio tries to register it, the row shows a red "Not active — another app on your system is using this key" note (live — it appears the moment a rebind fails and clears when you pick a free key), and the first time a given failure is ever seen Omniscio shows one warning toast pointing you here. The warning fires once per problem, not on every launch; the red note stays until the key actually binds. One Windows-specific case gets its own warning: if you have a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean keyboard installed, Ctrl+Space is also the Windows "switch input method" key — so the default Quick Launch shortcut can open Quick Launch and flip your keyboard's input language at the same time. When Omniscio detects that combination it drops a dismissible inbox notice with a one-click Rebind Quick Launch button that moves Quick Launch to the first free shortcut (a typical PC lands on Ctrl+Alt+Space), keeping any other Quick Launch keys you've added. The notice clears itself once Quick Launch is off Ctrl+Space, and you can switch the warning off entirely from Settings → Notifications (or the "Turn off these warnings" button on the notice itself). Everyone else keeps Ctrl+Space as the default — nothing changes for you unless you have a CJK keyboard. On macOS the Quick Launch default is ⌘⌥L (Cmd+Option+L), not Cmd+Space — Cmd+Space is macOS Spotlight, so Omniscio ships a Mac-friendly default there (Windows and Linux keep Ctrl+Space). Macs that already had Cmd+Space keep it, but you can now clear it from Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → System-wide with the X button and it stays cleared across restarts. Their original homes remain functional: Settings → System → Global Hotkey, Settings → Quick Launch → Quick Launch Hotkey, and Settings → Voice & Speech → Omni Session Briefing → Global hotkey for the Omni briefing combo. Everything else lives only in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts. Each global hotkey can be fully disabled — clear the field via the X button in its setting (treats empty as "not registered" so it can never intercept your keystrokes), or for Quick Launch / Omni briefing flip the dedicated "Enabled" toggle off.

A few keys behave differently depending on focus context: bare letter keys (E to archive, P to pause, H to snooze, C to continue, W to keep waiting) only fire when the composer textarea is NOT focused — typing "perfect" into a reply doesn't pause your sessions, and starting a message with "can you…" types a c rather than continuing the session. So that C (Continue / Check in) and W (Keep waiting) stay reachable, a session in a recovery state (paused / stalled / errored / ended — or parked on a login-expired "re-authenticate" screen) lands your cursor on the conversation instead of the box on entry — so a bare C continues immediately; click the box (or press R) to type. A session showing a tool-permission card (Allow / Deny) does the same, so Y / Enter (allow) and X (deny) work the moment you open it — a permission card is answered with a button, not by typing, and sending a message there actually cancels the request. If the card arrives while you're already mid-message, your cursor is never yanked out of the box: Enter still sends what you were writing. Shortcuts with a modifier (Ctrl+W, Alt+S, Ctrl+Shift+P) fire even with the composer focused, which is why most "must work while typing" actions get a modifier.

A small set of navigation hotkeys are universal — Go to Inbox (Ctrl+Q) and the project/inbox switchers (Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+0) reach their destination from anywhere in the app, even while you're typing inside a Mind Map node, a KMS note, the Question Widget, a pop-up dialog, or an embedded panel that's really its own mini-browser (the in-app browser, plugin panels, Help, Image Studio, Running Apps). No sub-view can intercept them. (The bare letter I for Go to Inbox still types normally inside a text box — only the modifier combos punch through.) The only two screens that keep the keyboard to themselves are the first-run setup wizard and the sign-in screen, so a stray Ctrl+1 can't skip them.

Press ? at any time to open a live cheat-sheet overlay listing the currently-active bindings (it reflects your customizations, not just defaults). On desktop, Omniscio surfaces this once on its own: shortly after your first real session on a machine, a one-time tip toast says "Tip: press ? anytime to see every keyboard shortcut" with a Show me button that opens the overlay. It reads your live binding (so it says the right key even if you rebound the overlay), never appears during setup or sign-in, never on phones/tablets, and once dismissed — or once you've opened the overlay yourself — it never returns. Prefer the mouse? The same overlay opens from the toolbar's "More" (⋯) menu → Help & support → Keyboard Shortcuts (pinnable like any toolbar button).

Where to find it

The bindings are listed and edited in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts — click a binding and press the keys you want. This page is the reference copy of the same list, useful when you are reading outside the app.

How it behaves

How to use it

1. To see the full live list with your overrides. Press ? anywhere in the app — or click the toolbar's "More" (⋯) menu → Keyboard Shortcuts (under Help & support). The Keyboard Shortcuts overlay opens with sections for Global, Navigation, Gmail, and Diff Review shortcuts. Press ? again or Esc to close.
2. To rebind a shortcut. Open Settings (gear icon) → Keyboard Shortcuts. The panel is a two-pane (master–detail) layout: a groups rail on the left and the selected group's shortcuts on the right. The rail lists a pinned System-wide group (the core OS hotkeys — Global, Quick Launch, Omni briefing, KMS window, KMS quick find, Supermail window, Team Chat window, Scratchpad window — plus a row for every Quick Launch tab and every saved Quick Email contact, all of which fire even when Omniscio is in the background) followed by General (app-focused everywhere), Navigation, Session, Focused message (while a message cursor is set — see below), Gmail (when active project is a Gmail channel), Diff Review (when reviewing a session's changes), and Briefings (when viewing the Briefings viewer). Each rail row shows a live count, and the header above the list names the group and says when its keys fire. There are no collapsible sections anymore — click a group to view it. A search box at the top filters across every group at once: matching shortcuts appear as a flat list (each tagged with its group) and the rail counts update live. You can search by the key itself, not just the action name — type a modifier or key (Ctrl, Shift, Tab, Enter, ↑), an alternate spelling (control, return, escape, win), or the symbol printed on the cap, and every shortcut whose combination uses that key surfaces, System-wide OS hotkeys included (so ctrl finds a CommandOrControl hotkey and win finds a Super one). To rebind: find the action and click + Add shortcut next to it (on an action that already has a shortcut this button stays tucked away until you hover the row or tab to it — so the label no longer repeats down every row; a shortcut-less action shows + Set a shortcut outright), then press the key combination you want — up to 25 bindings per action (the same Add flow now works on the System-wide global hotkeys and Quick Launch tab rows, so a global hotkey can hold several keys too). Each shortcut renders as a bounded pill (one or two are joined by a quiet "or"; three or more stack one-per-line), and an action you've changed from its defaults shows a small amber Customized badge. Conflicts (same combination on two actions in the same scope) show a yellow warning; OS-reserved combinations (Ctrl+R, F5, F11, F12, Ctrl+Shift+I/J, Alt+F4, Ctrl+F4) are rejected with an error so they can't intercept browser/Electron functions. And if you bind an app shortcut to a combination an enabled system-wide hotkey already owns (say a Screen Recorder or Quick Launch hotkey), the row shows an amber warning that the system-wide hotkey runs first — so this shortcut won't fire; the OS intercepts that combination before Omniscio's window ever sees it, so pick a different combination here or change the system-wide hotkey. To remove a binding, hover its pill and click the X; to restore defaults, click the circular-arrow Reset to defaults button at the top.
3. To find the Keyboard Shortcuts panel quickly. In Settings search, type any of hotkey, hotkeys, hot key, keyboard shortcut, keyboard shortcuts, shortcut, or shortcuts — the Keyboard Shortcuts entry is pinned to the top of results for these exact-match queries. Compound queries like global hotkey still rank normally so users searching for a specific OS-level field aren't hijacked.
4. Use the cheat sheet to discover, not memorize. Press ?, scan, then close. You don't have to learn everything — most users live with N (new session), Enter (send), Esc (interrupt), Ctrl+K (search), and a couple of letter keys.
5. Hover a control to see its key. Any control wired to a keyboard shortcut shows its CURRENT key right in its hover tooltip, drawn as a small physical key-cap — automatically, everywhere, with no per-button setup (hovering "Launch agent for this task" shows a G cap; the composer's Continue button shows C; the AI suggestion chips show Alt+1 / Alt+2 / Alt+3). This now includes every pop-up dialog's footer buttons: Cancel (and any close button) shows an Esc cap, and the confirm / primary button shows the key that submits it — Ctrl+Enter on most dialogs (e.g. the Start-session dialog), or Enter on a simple "Are you sure?" confirm — so you can dismiss or confirm any dialog from the keyboard and see how. This is the one universal way Omniscio displays a hotkey: the same key-cap style also renders in the Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts panel, the ? cheat-sheet, and menu shortcut hints, so a key looks identical wherever you meet it. On a phone or other keyboard-less touch device these shortcut hints are hidden — the session ⋯ menu's shortcut badges, a right-click / long-press menu's shortcut column, the search / command pop-up footer legend (↑↓ navigate · Enter select · Esc close), and the Undo toast's "(Ctrl+Z)" all drop out, since there's no key to press. (Tooltips don't open on touch anyway, and the Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts screen still shows every key everywhere — there the key IS the thing you're editing.) Every one reads the same resolved bindings as the ? overlay, so the moment you rebind an action all of them update together — tooltip, panel, and cheat-sheet alike. The key-caps aren't limited to buttons carrying that internal marker — a shortcut written directly in a tooltip's text is drawn as caps too, automatically, so a spot that pairs a key with surrounding words shows the key as a cap and the words as plain text. Each Quick Launch tab shows its in-window position key alongside its works-anywhere global hotkey as caps with a quiet "works anywhere" note (so Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+Alt+J appear as key-caps, not spelled out), and the first link in the latest agent reply — plus the first link in an open drip / alert / digest / weekly-summary / scheduled-message reading pane, or the link on the task row you're focused on in Tasks — reads "Open with Ctrl+Shift+Q" on hover with the key drawn as caps (rebinding updates it; clearing the binding hides it). (The voice-mic button intentionally shows no hint: clicking it starts dictation, whereas Alt+V starts a voice command — two different actions, so advertising that key on the mic would be misleading.)
6. While a menu is open, its keys belong to the menu. The arrow keys move through it, Enter or Space picks the highlighted row, and Esc or Tab closes just that menu — so a key you press in a menu never acts on the session behind it (single-letter shortcuts like E or J, and Tab for the next session, wait until the menu is closed). Shortcuts with Ctrl, Alt or Cmd still work. This holds for Omniscio's own menus, right-click menus included (plugin panels run their own menus). In the Quick Launch window (Ctrl+Space), Esc (or Ctrl+W, or a second Ctrl+Space) closes whatever is open on top first — a menu, a dropdown, a popover, the emoji picker or a palette — and the next press closes the window.

Acting on one message — the Focused message keys

You can put a keyboard cursor on a single message in a session's conversation, and then act on just that message:

Keys	What they do
Shift+↑ / Shift+↓	Move the message cursor up / down the conversation. Until a message is focused, the three keys below do nothing.
Ctrl+C	Copy the focused message. A real text selection, or the cursor sitting in an input, still wins — this only copies the bubble when nothing is selected and you are not typing.
Ctrl+Shift+T	Toggle the focused message's tool-activity section open or closed.
Ctrl+Shift+B	Re-run from focused message — opens the re-run dialog and forks a new session seeded from that message.

All four live in their own Focused message group in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts and are rebindable like any other shortcut. The group is scoped: its keys only do anything while a message cursor is set, which is what lets Ctrl+C mean "copy this message" here without disturbing ordinary copy everywhere else.

One-handed layout (opt-in)

Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts has an Apply one-handed layout toggle just below Reset to defaults. Turn it on to write a left-hand-only layout so you can drive the conversation thread without leaving the home row — handy if your other hand is busy; turn it off to put those keys back to their defaults (your other custom shortcuts stay untouched). The toggle shows on whenever the layout is currently applied. It replaces a setup people used to script in AutoHotKey with native Omniscio bindings. Find it fast — search Settings for one-handed or left-handed and the One-handed layout result jumps you straight to it.

What it sets (as editable overrides — your other custom bindings are preserved, and turning the toggle off — or Reset to defaults — undoes it):

Key	Does
W / S	Previous / next session
A / D	Down / up one message in the thread
Ctrl+W / Ctrl+S	Up / down one message in the thread
Shift+W / Shift+S	Up / down one message in the thread — the same as Ctrl+W / Ctrl+S, on the Shift modifier
Alt+W / Alt+A	Jump to the top / bottom of the thread
E	Archive · R Reply · Q Focus the question · H Snooze · G Jump to attention · F Pause
Z	Keep waiting — re-arm the silent 30-min wait on a timed-out session (moved off W, which now switches sessions)

Because the layout reuses Ctrl+W for "up one message" and gives F to pause, applying it moves archive onto E only. F reaches the session-list focus filter nowhere: that filter answers to Shift+F, which the layout leaves alone (the toolbar bell is a different feature and does not switch it; rebind the filter in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, and while it is on the sidebar banner's Show all button turns it off). It also puts message-stepping on the bare A / D keys (A down, D up), so snooze moves to H and jump-to-attention to G — both still one key, just relocated to keep A/D free. Keep-waiting likewise moves to Z, since its default key W now switches sessions. The W/S keys do double duty: pressed bare they move between sessions, and with Shift held (Shift+W/Shift+S) they step one message up/down — the same physical pair as Ctrl+W/Ctrl+S, on the Shift modifier — so your left hand drives both the session list and the thread from the home row. (As with the other thread-step keys, A/D and Shift+W/Shift+S only navigate when the composer isn't focused — while you're typing they just enter the letter.) The one-handed Alt+W / Alt+A jumps (top / bottom of the thread) fire even while the message box holds the cursor — so the jump is reliable no matter where your focus is — and they scroll without pulling the cursor out of the box. Their default siblings Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End still fire only when the composer isn't focused, so those keep moving the text cursor to the start / end of your draft while you type.

Send on Caps Lock (optional)

Right below the Apply one-handed layout button is an optional Send on Caps Lock toggle, off by default. Turn it on and pressing Caps Lock in the message box sends your message — exactly like Enter. It's a reachable send key for one-handed use, so your left hand can send without reaching across to Enter. It works whether or not you've applied the one-handed layout, and it doesn't change how Enter or Shift+Enter behave. Desktop only (phones have no Caps Lock). Find it by searching Settings for caps lock. One caveat: pressing Caps Lock still toggles your keyboard's Caps Lock light — the app can't stop that.

Hotkey training mode (opt-in)

To actively build muscle memory, turn on Settings → Sessions → "Hotkey training mode." With it on, the first click on a button that also has a keyboard shortcut is blocked and a small "Press <key>" bubble shows the shortcut instead. There's a 3-click soft escape hatch for when you're in a hurry: the second click on the same control is still blocked with a "Click again to allow" bubble, and the third click goes through with a green "Allowed ✓" confirmation. Keyboard shortcuts always work, it never applies on a touch screen, and the Settings gear is never blocked so you can always turn it back off. Full detail: hotkey-training-mode.md.

Related

The full list of bindings is long, so it continues on Keyboard shortcuts — sessions and navigation, Keyboard shortcuts — navigation, search and display, and the mechanism behind them on Keyboard shortcuts — how the binding system works.

• open-settings.md — Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts is where rebinding happens
• send-a-message.md — Submit key (Enter vs Ctrl+Enter) lives under Settings → Sessions
• snooze-a-session.md — H opens the Snooze Palette
• pause-or-stop-a-session.md — P toggles pause
• archive-a-session.md — Ctrl+W / E archives, Ctrl+Z undoes
• focus-mode.md — Shift+F filters the sidebar to attention-only
• tray-and-window.md — Ctrl+Shift+M restores the window from anywhere
• global-search.md — Ctrl+K opens search
• cli-keybindings-control.md — programmatic keybinding mutations from outside Omniscio