The focus guard was still there. I moved the trigger to alt-space, wrote that the guard was no longer
load-bearing, and then kept it anyway "as belt-and-braces" — which left the exact bug the move was meant to
fix. Focus is usually in the chat composer, so the launcher did not open from the place it is most often
wanted. Reported one commit later, by the owner, from a text field.
The guard existed because shift-space types a space and eating that keystroke was unacceptable. Alt-space
types nothing, so there is nothing to protect. preventDefault on the handler covers the residual case a
layout might deliver, which is what the guard was really insuring against.
isTyping is deleted rather than left unused: a dead helper carrying a long comment about a decision that has
been reversed is worse than no helper, because the comment still reads as current.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Third chord in a day, and each move was the owner naming a collision on the machine he actually uses:
ctrl-space is Brave's address bar, shift-space types a space, alt-space is the window menu — and he rebound
that rather than give up the chord.
Shift-space was the worst of the three and it is worth saying why, because it read as the safe choice.
It is a real key combination inside a text field: it types a space, and people hold shift through one more
often than they think while typing capitals. So it had to stand down whenever focus was in an input — which
is where focus usually is, the chat composer — and a launcher you have to click out of a field to reach is
not a launcher.
Alt-space means nothing in a text field, so the isTyping guard stops being the thing holding the feature up
and becomes belt-and-braces. Kept anyway: two lines against some layout delivering alt-space as a literal
character, which is cheap to prevent and expensive to discover.
`altKey` with `ev.code`, not `ev.key` — alt-space produces a different `key` on several layouts and nothing
at all on others, while the physical key is `Space` everywhere.
No second chord. Two triggers for one thing means two things to collide with, and this one has moved twice.
The TODO item's id still says ctrl-space. Ids are stable by design, so it stays; its body now records all
three moves and which guard was load-bearing for which.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MAX_RESULTS was 8. Core items alone fill eight slots, so on a populated server the empty-query list stopped
at Browser and none of the fourteen plugin tiles below it could be reached — unless you already knew the
name well enough to type it, which is not a thing a launcher gets to require. The owner caught it on alpha
with the dock and the launcher side by side; on this machine, which has few plugins, it looked complete.
The items were there the whole time. This was not a missing source — it was a silent truncation, with
nothing on screen saying "and 20 more", which is exactly how a cap reads as an absent feature.
There was never a layout reason for it either: the results container has scrolled since it was written.
Removed, and the active row now scrolls itself into view with `block: 'nearest'` so arrowing past the fold
works and arrowing through the visible middle does not jump the list.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things made it read as a generic list rather than as this app's own, and neither was the item source —
that was already the dock, and plugins were already in it.
TILES. SpotlightItem dropped `tile`, so every row got a `${color}22` tinted square: a third visual language
belonging to neither of the dock's two. Which put a coloured pane behind Calendar, Contacts and every
plugin's logo — the exact thing the dock's own comment calls out as reading like a mistake. Rows now use the
dock's rule: a filled square of the item's colour with a white glyph, or no background at all when the
artwork brings its own frame. A settings row with no colour keeps a muted glyph instead of getting a swatch
invented for it.
SETTINGS. The hand-listed sections had drifted within two days of being written, and the file's own comment
predicted it ("worth revisiting if it drifts"). Nine rows against a settings area that has twenty-one:
Languages and Voice missing entirely, every AI and System section missing, `/settings/users` pointing at a
route that does not exist — it is `/settings/user-management/users` — and four different rows sharing the
User glyph, which is most of what made the panel look generic.
Now twenty rows, copied from the five screens that declare them, with each group naming its source file so
checking is one grep. The comment records that the drift HAPPENED rather than predicting it, and says
deriving them from the screens is the fix if it happens a third time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ctrl-space focuses the address bar in Brave, so it never reached the app.
shift-space is a real combination inside a text field — it types a space, and people hold shift through
one more often than they think while typing capitals. So the trigger is ignored when focus is in an
input, a textarea or anything contenteditable, and the space is typed as normal.
The cost is worth stating rather than discovering: focus usually IS in the chat composer, so opening
Spotlight from there means clicking out first. If that turns out to be the common case, a double-tap of
shift is the escape hatch — it conflicts with nothing anywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The dock is full and cannot grow. Once navigation lives here it is free to be a short list of what you
actually use rather than a complete one — which is the other half of this and is not done yet.
It INDEXES THE DOCK rather than keeping a list of its own. The dock is already the composed,
permission-filtered answer to "what can this account open here": the shell's screens, plus whatever
installed plugins contribute, minus anything canVisit refuses. A second list would be a second answer
to one question, and it would be wrong the day somebody installs a plugin. So a new plugin appears in
Spotlight for the reason it appears in the dock — because it is installed — and nothing here is edited.
Settings sections are added, because they are what people hunt for and the dock deliberately does not
carry them. Those ARE hand-listed, which is a real cost written down in the file: a section added to
IntegrationsSettings will not appear until someone adds it here. The alternative couples five settings
screens to the shell to save five lines.
Matching is subsequence, not substring, and lives in its own file so it can be tested with strings:
"chq" finds Command HQ, "apik" finds API keys, "fi" gives Files rather than Profile. The weights encode
what "the right result" means — exact label, then prefix, then word boundaries, then adjacency, with
shortness breaking ties so "Chat" beats "Chat history". Labels are worth about three times hints, and
paths almost nothing, so a path fragment finds an item without ever outranking a real label. Nine tests
cover the ORDER rather than the matching, because returning the right set is easy and returning it with
the right thing first is the product.
ctrl-space, not alt-space: the more macOS-shaped chord is already load-bearing for the owner. Not
cmd-k either — that belongs to the browser on some platforms and to text fields on others.
Mounted beside the header and the dock rather than inside the content region, so it still gets you off
a screen that is maximised, erroring or mid-navigation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>