Customizing keyboard shortcuts

The Hotkeys panel lists every keyboard shortcut in Myne and lets you search them by name. You can add or remove a shortcut for most commands, restore a command’s default, or reset every custom shortcut at once. If a key combination is already used by another command, Myne warns you and names the commands it collides with, but it never blocks you: the new shortcut is assigned anyway.

The Hotkeys panel

Open Settings → Hotkeys (the rail runs Account → Privacy → Sync → Editor → Files → Transcription → Hotkeys → Appearance → Storage → About, with a Developer section below it when Developer mode is on). The panel opens with a short reminder at the top: “View and change keyboard shortcuts. Only the tab-cycle shortcut (Ctrl+Tab) is fixed.”

Shortcuts are listed in groups: General, Notes, Panes & Tabs, Navigation, View, and Editor formatting. Each row names a command and shows its current shortcut as a small key chip. A command can have no shortcut, one, or several.

To find a command quickly, type into the Search shortcuts… box at the top. The list filters as you type, matching against the command name and its group.

Adding and removing a shortcut

To add a shortcut to a command, click the + on its row and press the key combination you want. The captured combination is added to that command, so a single command can carry several shortcuts.

A combination has to include at least one modifier (Cmd, Ctrl, or Alt) or be a function key. A plain key on its own is rejected, with the message: “Add a modifier (⌘, Ctrl, or Alt). A key on its own can’t be a shortcut.”

To remove a shortcut, click the × on its key chip. Removing a command’s only shortcut leaves it with none until you add one back.

If you have changed a command, a ↺ appears on its row; click it to restore that one command to its default shortcut. To undo every change at once, click Reset all hotkeys… at the top. That asks first — “Reset every custom shortcut to its default?” — so a stray click won’t wipe your shortcuts.

Your custom shortcuts are saved in the vault’s encrypted preferences, so they stay set across restarts. Like the rest of your preferences, they live on your device.

Conflicts

If you assign a combination that another command already uses, Myne shows a warning naming the other commands (“Already used by . Added anyway.”) and assigns the shortcut anyway. A combination that collides with more than one command names all of them, separated by commas. Conflicts are warning-only on purpose; the app tells you, but it never stops you mid-rebind.

Once two commands share a combination, both rows keep a small ⚠ conflict marker so you can find and resolve them later if you want to. You resolve a conflict the same way you made it: remove the shared shortcut from one of the commands, or rebind one of them to something else.

The one fixed shortcut

One row is shown for reference and cannot be changed: the tab-cycle shortcut, Ctrl+Tab, which cycles through open tabs. It is tagged fixed, and the +, ×, and ↺ controls are not offered on that row — it is a literal-Ctrl combination Myne’s shortcut layer cannot tell apart from its neighbours on Windows and Linux.

Everything else in the panel can be rebound, including the editor-formatting shortcuts such as bold, italic and the list toggles. A rebind takes effect in the open editor immediately, without losing your cursor or your undo history.

In a browser there is a second class of exception, and it belongs to the browser rather than to Myne. Some combinations never reach the page at all: the ones your browser keeps for opening a tab, focusing the address bar and so on. Try to bind one and Myne refuses it and names the browser action that owns it. A combination that only some browsers intercept is warned about and assigned anyway, the same warn-only policy conflicts get. A shortcut you already had that your browser takes stays in the list, marked Unavailable here, because it is not broken: your keymap syncs, and the same shortcut still works in the desktop app.

Moving between the three regions

Four commands in the Navigation group move keyboard focus between the three parts of the window: the notes sidebar, the editor, and the right panel.

F6 cycles through them in that order and wraps around. It is the only one of the four that ships with a shortcut. The other three go straight to one region each, and they have no shortcut until you give them one, because three more reserved key combinations would be three more conflicts for someone who never wanted them.

A region that is not on screen is skipped, so a collapsed sidebar or a tab with no right panel does not swallow a press.

This matters most inside a note. Tab indents in the editor and keeps doing so, which means Tab alone cannot get you back out to the sidebar or the panel. F6 is the way out.

Each region holds a single stop in the Tab order, and the arrow keys move within it once you are there. In the note list and the folder tree, the arrow keys move the selection and the tab strips move focus between tabs, where Enter or Space then switches to the focused tab.

Limits

Custom shortcuts only rebind commands that already exist. There is no plugin or scripting surface here: the keymap binds key combinations to Myne’s built-in commands, and it can never introduce a new command or any custom behavior. A shortcut you set can change which keys trigger a command, or remove a command’s shortcut entirely, but nothing more.

The keymap is stored as an ordinary field in your encrypted vault preferences, and it is not load-bearing for security. The worst a tampered or replayed value can do is rebind a shortcut or drop one — it cannot reach your notes or your keys. Many commands are also reachable from the command palette — Open settings, Show graph view, Toggle reading view, and Toggle focus mode among them — so removing their shortcut does not put them out of reach.

Conflicts are deliberately left as warnings rather than blocks. Myne names the colliding command and lets you decide; it does not decide for you.

Shortcuts

These are the default shortcuts for the rebindable commands, plus the one fixed tab-cycle shortcut. You can change any of the rebindable ones in the Hotkeys panel.