Keyboard first

Commands

• Every user-facing action is a Command (id, title, runnable) registered in one CommandRegistry.
• Command ids are dotted and grouped by area: file.open, view.toggleStatusBar, help.reportProblem.
• Titles come from command.<id> and palette descriptions from command.<id>.desc in the message catalogs, so a registered command is localized and discoverable without extra work.
• A command that cannot run in the current context is shown greyed with a tooltip that says why, not hidden.

Command Palette

• MUST Opened by M-x in Emacs keymaps and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P in the others.
• Fuzzy matching over title, id and description; a query that names a command’s title outranks a fuzzy hit. Each row shows the active key binding. See the Command Palette template.
• It is an in-scene overlay in the window’s root StackPane, not a javafx.stage.Popup. On Windows a Popup does not reliably take OS keyboard focus and the whole app can stop receiving keystrokes.
• The same picker (QuickOpen) serves every other list choice: recent files, themes, keymaps, settings values.

Editora: M-x over the editor; typing git lists every Git command.

Torrenta: the same palette, filtered to torrent actions with their shortcuts.

Termina: the palette over a shell session, filtered to tab commands.

Keymaps

• Ship presets as JSON resources: Emacs, CUA, IntelliJ, VS Code and Sublime, with .mac.json variants where Cmd replaces Ctrl.
• Layer order: base keymap → user overrides → plugin keymaps → the user’s own bindings again, so the user always has the last word (KeymapLayers).
• A keymap editor in Settings lists every command with its chord, searchable, with conflict warnings.
• Never bake a chord into translated text. Derive the label from the active keymap.
• Multi-key prefixes (C-x …) show a which-key style hint listing the possible next keys.

Keymap: Select… offers Emacs, CUA, Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA.

M-x kill: each command shows its chord from the active keymap.

Termina's shortcuts reference: every key, grouped by menu.

Focus and accessibility

• Every interactive control is reachable with Tab and operable with Space/Enter.
• Keyboard focus is drawn by one :focus-visible block at the end of app.css.
• Icon-only buttons are built by a helper (Icons.button) that sets both the tooltip and the accessible text.
• On/off rows use a keyboard-operable switch (SettingSwitch, TOGGLE_BUTTON role). A bare AtlantaFX ToggleSwitch is mouse-only.
• Readable text uses -color-fg-muted or stronger; -color-fg-subtle (about 3:1) is for disabled or decorative text only.
• Rows wrap instead of truncating to ”…”. Check German at 1024 px wide.