Keyboard shortcuts

Press F1 in XerisOS to see this on screen. This file and the F1 overlay are generated from the same table in src/gui/shortcuts.c — if you add a shortcut in idt.asm, add its row there and both stay correct.

Global chords that only need to call one function no longer live in idt.asm at all: they are rows in src/gui/hotkeys.c, which the keyboard ISR calls once. Adding one is a C edit. The chords the ISR still owns are the ones that need its register state — Alt+Tab, Win+arrows and Win+1..4.

Getting around#

Key	Does
F1	This list
Ctrl+Space	Command palette
Win+A	Open or close Control Center
Win+Space	Quick launch (the palette, on a chord no text field can eat)
F4	Ask Ari — from any window, any desktop
Win+R	Rewind — what was on screen, from RAM
Win+Shift+R	Time Lens — scrub the last ten seconds of desktop frames
Win+L	Lock the session
F9	Live vitals HUD (tok/s, temperature, cores, network, heap, uptime)
F10	Notification history
PrtSc	Screenshot to a BMP
Right-click	Context menu (on a window, or on the bare desktop)
Esc	Close the topmost menu or overlay

Esc peels one layer at a time, topmost first: shortcut sheet → context menu → notifications → vitals → focus ring. With none of those open it goes through to the app, so every app's own Esc still works.

Windows#

Key	Does
Alt+Tab	Next window on this desktop (unminimizes)
Ctrl+W	Close the active window
Win+1..4	Switch virtual desktop
Win+Left / Right	Snap the active window to that half
Win+Up	Maximize
Win+Z	Snap layouts — a picker of all eight positions
Double-click title bar	Maximize / restore

Keyboard focus#

Key	Does
Tab	Move to the next control
Shift+Tab	Move to the previous control
Enter	Press the focused control

In Control Center, Tab moves between the volume control and the action list. Left / Right adjust volume, Home / End jump to 0 / 100 percent, and Space or Enter toggles mute while volume is focused.

Tab order is paint order, which is visual order. The focus ring only appears once you have pressed Tab — pointer users never see a ring they did not ask for. Inside a text field Tab stays a character, so the editors keep their indent.

Editing#

Works in Text Pad, Notes, Code, XIDE and the Ask Ari input line — they all run on the same widget (src/apps/textfield.c), so these behave identically everywhere.

Key	Does
Ctrl+C / X / V	Copy / cut / paste
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / redo (a typed run is one step)
Ctrl+A	Select all
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+F	Find (Enter next, Tab to the replace field)
Shift+arrows	Extend the selection
Ctrl+arrows	Move by word
Home / End	Start / end of line
Delete	Forward delete
Double-click	Select word
Triple-click	Select line
F6	Word wrap (Text Pad)

While Ari is writing#

Key	Does
Esc	Stop generating
Tab	Accept what is there and stop

Both are read straight out of the keyboard ring during generation, so they work even though the machine is inside a blocking forward pass with interrupts off.

Tuning the feel#

Key repeat and double-click speed are settable from the Terminal and persist in /ARI/SETTINGS.CFG:

input                      show the current values
input repeat 400           ms a key must be held before it repeats (0 = off)
input rate 40              ms between repeats
input dblclick 400         ms window for a double-click

Every value is clamped to a usable range, so a typo cannot leave you with a keyboard you have to fix using that same keyboard.

Chords never auto-repeat. That is deliberate rather than incidental: Ctrl+W is close-window on the same scancode as the letter w, so a repeating chord would close every window on the desktop in about a second.