Keyboard shortcuts

The header's left controls are Settings, sidebar toggle, then New workspace. Ctrl+Shift+T (or your configured replacement) also creates a workspace.

Edits in Preferences are saved immediately and restored on the next launch, including removed bindings and actions displaced by a shortcut reassignment. Storage is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/among/shortcuts.json (or ~/.config/among/shortcuts.json); see Preferences storage. If saving fails, the edit remains session-only and Preferences shows a warning.

Bindings live in a single registry (src/shortcuts.rs), which is what makes them inspectable and changeable without touching the code that uses them.

Defaults

Action	Binding	Notes
Focus up	Alt+Up	no neighbour in that direction: no change
Focus down	Alt+Down	no neighbour in that direction: no change
Focus left	Alt+Left	no neighbour in that direction: no change
Focus right	Alt+Right	no neighbour in that direction: no change
Activate workspace 1	Alt+1	beyond the last workspace: no change
Activate workspace 2	Alt+2
Activate workspace 3	Alt+3
Activate workspace 4	Alt+4
Activate workspace 5	Alt+5
Activate workspace 6	Alt+6
Activate workspace 7	Alt+7
Activate workspace 8	Alt+8
Activate workspace 9	Alt+9
New workspace	Ctrl+Shift+t	becomes the active workspace
Split pane	Ctrl+Shift+n	orientation chosen from the pane's shape
Grow pane	Ctrl+Shift+Right	one step; only that split moves
Shrink pane	Ctrl+Shift+Left	one step; only that split moves
Close pane	Ctrl+Shift+w	cascades to the workspace, then to exit
Open preferences	Ctrl+,	shortcuts and plugins
Toggle fullscreen	F11	returns to the previous size
Toggle pane zoom	Ctrl+Shift+x	fills the workspace; again restores
Next workspace	Ctrl+PageDown	wraps around
Previous workspace	Ctrl+PageUp	wraps around

This list is generated from the running registry, so it cannot drift from what the application installs:

AMONG_LIST_BINDINGS=1 among

Several of these are additions beyond the five originally requested. They exist because the specification requires a keyboard path to each behaviour, and a required behaviour with no way to reach it is not implemented: divider resizing, workspace cycling, preferences, fullscreen, and pane expansion. Ctrl+Shift+Arrow is used for resizing so it sits a modifier level away from Alt+Arrow focus movement — adjusting a divider and choosing a direction need to be distinguishable by touch.

Why these and not others

The obvious alternative for pane focus is Ctrl+Shift+Arrow, as used by several terminal emulators. Alt+Arrow was chosen because it does not collide with anything on a stock GNOME desktop.

Verified against the live settings schema on the target machine:

• GNOME claims Ctrl+Alt+Arrow for switching its own workspaces, Ctrl+Alt+Tab for panels, Alt+Tab for applications, and every Super sequence for the overview.
• None of the defaults above touches those.
• Ctrl+Shift+T/N/W are unclaimed by the desktop, and unclaimed by readline and zsh.
• Alt+Arrow is not bound by the desktop or by GNOME Terminal's own profile.

Binding a sequence the desktop also handles would make the action silently never fire, which looks like a broken application rather than a conflict. The registry reports such bindings instead of accepting them (is_reserved_by_desktop).

Splitting

There is one split binding, not separate horizontal and vertical ones. The orientation comes from the shape of the pane being split:

• width ≥ height → a vertical divider, so the two panes sit side by side
• height > width → a horizontal divider, so the two panes are stacked

Comparing the two extents directly, rather than their ratio, matches the intuition that a wide area divides better across. This is the same behaviour as Terminator's split_auto.

The new pane receives focus, so typing continues where the user last was looking.

Running an action without a key

AMONG_ACTION=split_pane among

Accepted names: new-workspace, split-pane/split, close-pane/close, focus-up, focus-down, focus-left, focus-right, next-workspace, previous-workspace, workspace-N.

The environment is used rather than a command-line flag because GApplication parses and rejects any option it does not recognise, which makes a custom flag unusable.

Invoking an action that has no binding reports it instead of doing nothing silently:

AMONG_ACTION=fly-away among
# among: unknown action name in AMONG_ACTION

Rebinding

Overrides are read at startup and applied to the running process:

AMONG_REBIND="split-pane=<Control><Shift>d" among

Several entries are separated by commas. An unusable accelerator or an unknown action name is reported and ignored rather than accepted:

AMONG_REBIND="split-pane=<<bad" among
# among: `<<bad` is not a usable accelerator

Binding a sequence that another action already holds transfers it, so the mapping from sequence to action stays a function — the previous holder becomes unbound.

Preferences

Ctrl+, opens a preferences window with two pages.

Keyboard lists every action the application can perform, including ones with no binding — a list of only the bound actions would hide half of what can be configured. Select a row to capture a new combination; select it again to cancel, or press Escape to remove the binding. A rebind applies immediately, without restarting.

A sequence the desktop handles first is refused rather than stored, because the action would then never fire — the same reason the defaults avoid Super and Ctrl+Alt.

Plugins lists every configured plugin with its state: running, disabled, not installed, stopped, or speaking an incompatible protocol version. The switch starts or stops the plugin; stopping one withdraws its content immediately rather than leaving it frozen on screen. Plugins that are missing or incompatible cannot be switched on, since there is nothing to start.

How shortcuts are wired

Actions are registered as gio::SimpleActions on the window and the keys are attached with GtkApplication::set_accels_for_action, under the win. prefix.

This is not an arbitrary choice. A GtkShortcutController looks like the obvious tool, but its default LOCAL scope is consulted after the focused widget — and a terminal consumes every key it receives. The result is that no application shortcut fires at all while the terminal has focus, which is the only state that matters. GLOBAL scope fixes the ordering, but the action-and-accelerator route is the one GTK itself uses for application shortcuts and is what is done here.

Unclaimed sequences still reach the terminal: GTK only consumes what a registered accelerator matches.

Global shortcuts

Everything above is inside the window, and takes effect only while the application has focus. A desktop-wide shortcut — one that works while another application is focused — is a different mechanism: it has to be registered with the desktop shell.

On GNOME that means a custom keybinding in org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys, whose command invokes the application. The neighbouring glagol project does exactly this in its hotkeys.rs, and that approach is the one to copy if a shortcut has to work from outside the application.

Unrecognised keys

Anything the application does not claim is delivered to the focused terminal unchanged. A shortcut is handled by a ShortcutController on the window, and GTK delivers accelerators before the focused widget, so a claimed sequence never reaches the terminal while everything else falls through.

This matters for a terminal: an application shortcut that leaked into the shell would insert stray text into a running command.