4.3 Keybinds

2 min read

Keyboard chords have three owners, and the boundaries are physical rather than chosen:

1. The browser and OS own what they own — Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Alt+Tab, F11 on most browsers — and a web page never sees some of them. Atrium's defaults avoid the common ones.
2. The shell owns the reserved chords: global desktop actions that work everywhere, including while an application frame has focus.
3. The focused application owns everything else.

The chord table is session state, shipped in the snapshot as keymap: a list of { chord, action }. Chords are written as sorted modifiers plus a key — Ctrl+Alt+T, key from the keyboard event's key value, single characters uppercased. Actions are strings; every action today is a shell action, and the string form is what leaves room for application-owned globals later without a schema change.

In the shell's own document, a capture-phase listener matches the table and runs the action. Inside an application frame, the shell cannot hear keys at all — so the SDK carries the shell's half inward: it receives the reserved chord list with ready, captures those chords at its own capture phase, prevents the default, and posts the chord back to the shell, which runs the action. Everything else passes to the application untouched.

The arrangement is cooperative. A frame that does not load the SDK swallows global chords while focused — the documented cost of not integrating — and a hostile frame could at worst do the same, since the shell acts only on chords present in its own table.

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