ctrl+space opens spotlight, and ctrl+? tells you everything else

Fourth chord for the launcher, and the last move is a return: ctrl-space → shift-space → alt-space →
ctrl-space. Every one was the owner naming a real collision, and this one is the interesting direction —
alt-space is the GNOME window menu, he rebound the desktop to keep it, disliked what he rebound it to, and
would rather move the app than the window manager.

ctrl-space was ruled out on 2026-08-20 as "focuses the address bar in Brave". That observation was made
before anything preventDefault'ed it, and the trade has changed: rebinding a browser is cheaper than
rebinding a desktop. Written down in the file, because if the address bar still wins the key never reaches
the handler and nothing in this repository can help — the fix would be in Brave.

`!ev.shiftKey && !ev.altKey` matters: ctrl+SHIFT+space is the theme browser, and one chord opening both is
the bug that needed a capture-phase listener to fix on the theme side. Verified in the built bundle that the
two conditions are disjoint.

CTRL+? renders every shortcut from a registry, ported in shape from vimazing's gameInfo.ts — controls
declared as data, help screen renders them. Its renderer was a recursive `any` walk, right for a game whose
help also carries rules and scoring; here the content is one shape, so the renderer is typed and boring and
the value is in state/shortcuts.ts.

The registry is deliberately NOT authoritative yet, and says so: the handlers still hold their own
conditions, so changing a chord here does not move it. Each entry names the file that implements it, so the
pair is one search apart. Making it the source of truth is the configurable-shortcuts work, and doing it now
would rewrite three handlers for nothing visible.

Also removed a line I put in the theme dropdown yesterday promising "alt+space to search every theme by
name". Themes are not Spotlight items — that was an instruction for a feature nobody built, sitting in the
UI as though it worked. It now points at ctrl+?, which exists. Two comments naming ctrl+alt+space for the
theme browser were corrected to ctrl+shift+space with the older chord noted as still accepted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-22 15:57:42 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent bcdc769083
commit f586d748d6
6 changed files with 233 additions and 12 deletions
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ import { Background } from './Background';
import { Header } from './Header';
import { Dock, CORE_DOCK_ITEMS, dockItemsFromPlugins, defaultDockPaths } from './Dock';
import { Spotlight } from './Spotlight/Spotlight';
import { ShortcutsModal } from './ShortcutsModal';
import { useIsTouch } from './useIsTouch';
import { usePageTitleSync } from '@/state/usePageTitle';
import { RouteGate } from './RouteGate';
@@ -51,6 +52,9 @@ export function DashboardLayout({ children }: DashboardLayoutProps) {
{/* Outside the content region on purpose, like the header and the dock: whatever a screen is doing
— maximised panel, error boundary, mid-navigation — ctrl-space still gets you off it. */}
<Spotlight />
{/* Outside the content region for the same reason Spotlight is: ctrl+? has to work from a maximised
panel, an error boundary, or mid-navigation. */}
<ShortcutsModal />
{/* overflow-CLIP, not hidden: `hidden` still makes this a scroll container, and the nav Dock —
absolute, parked below the bottom edge by translateY while hidden — adds its transformed box to
the scrollable overflow. So clicking a link let the browser scroll this section ~70px to reveal