Keyboard shortcuts

Brisal drives almost everything from the keyboard through a tmux-style keymap: a leader key opens a menu of multi-key sequences, and a few modes rebind the keyboard entirely while they’re active. Every binding on this page is a default — all of them are remappable per workspace from Settings → Hotkeys.

How the keymap reads

• A chord is one key plus any modifiers, joined with +: ctrl+p, mod+m, ctrl+shift+enter.
• A sequence is one or more chords separated by spaces: ctrl+b w n means “press Ctrl+B, then w, then n”. Sequences are how the leader works.
• Bindings are case-insensitive and modifier order doesn’t matter — Ctrl+S, S+Ctrl, and ctrl+s are the same chord.

The leader key

The leader is ctrl+b. Pressing it starts a sequence and opens the which-key menu — a hint surface listing the keys you can press next and what each does. Keep pressing keys to walk the menu; it fires as soon as you reach a bound sequence. If you pause too long (5 seconds by default) or press a cancel key, the pending sequence is dropped.

Cancel keys — Esc, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+G, Ctrl+D — abort a pending sequence and back out of a mode. Where the which-key menu appears on screen is an appearance setting, per workspace.

The which-key menu after pressing Ctrl+B: the next keys and what each does. w, s, and p continue into longer sequences (“more options…”).

Global

Works anywhere in the app.

Command palette

A searchable list of every action the keymap knows, with each action’s current bindings shown alongside — the fastest way to run something you haven’t memorized, or to discover what a key does.

Inside it: type to filter, ↑/↓ to move (the cursor wraps), Enter to run, Esc to close.

The command palette: every action, its bindings, and the context each belongs to — searchable and runnable without leaving the keyboard.

GOTO jumper

A jump-to jumper over your sessions, workspaces, and projects. Open it broad, or open it pre-scoped to one kind.

Inside GOTO you can also switch scope by typing a keyword prefix — sessions:, workspaces:, or projects: — instead of opening a pre-scoped variant.

GOTO jumping across everything: workspaces, projects, and sessions in one list, each row showing where it lives.

Message-select mode

A modal, vim-style mode for moving over the messages in a session transcript — to copy one, or to start annotating it. Entering the mode blurs the composer; a cancel key exits.

Annotate mode

Line-level annotation of a message: walk the lines, open a comment on one, tag it, then send the assembled review to the agent.

While writing a comment:

Message composer

When the cursor is in the message box of a session:

While the composer’s inline picker is open (for example, choosing a file to reference):

Conventional keys

Standard keys Brisal honors consistently across dialogs, selectors, and lists, so you rarely need the mouse:

Customizing bindings

Every binding above is a default you can change, per workspace, from Settings → Hotkeys — an editor that’s a live view over the running keymap.

The Hotkeys tab: the leader and timeout up top, then every action grouped by context with its bindings as removable badges.

In it you can:

• Change the leader and the sequence timeout.
• Add a binding by capturing chords live, or remove one — including unbinding a shipped default.
• Copy another workspace’s bindings wholesale with Copy from workspace….
• See inline warnings for conflicts (a duplicate sequence, a sequence shadowed by a shorter prefix, or a default you’ve unbound).

Saving writes a sparse override to the workspace’s keybindings.toml, and the live keymap rebuilds immediately. The editor is the supported path; for the file format and fields, see Config files.

What to read next

• Settings — where the Hotkeys editor lives and how per-workspace overrides merge over the system defaults.
• Config files — the keybindings.toml schema, for hand-editing.
• Sessions — where the composer keys, message-select, and annotate modes apply.