Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? for the list, or the key icon in the top bar — hidden below 560 px of width, where a keyboard is unlikely. Settings has a way in too. Everything on the list can be changed; a few fixed extras are not on it (below). Shortcuts do nothing while a dialog is open (except Escape), and a held key does not repeat them.

The rule that shapes all of them

A terminal owns the keyboard. Anything typed while a session has the focus belongs to that session — stealing even one key from tmux would be worse than having no shortcuts at all. So these fire only when the focus is somewhere else: not in a terminal, not in a text box, not in anything you are writing in. The help says so at the top rather than leaving you to wonder why nothing happened.

Except the chords with Ctrl and Shift — the desk's, Ctrl+Shift+G (Got it, all) among them. On a desk the focus is nearly always in a terminal, so they never arrived where they are wanted. A terminal cannot tell Ctrl+Shift+G from Ctrl+G (the old encoding has no room for Shift with Ctrl; xterm sends the same byte), so taking those costs a program nothing it could have seen — only the ones bound to a shortcut are taken. Ctrl+Alt (the sidebar) stays the terminal's: Emacs and readline use it.

On a Mac

Ctrl is the Control key ⌃, not Command ⌘; Alt is Option ⌥. So Ctrl+Shift+G is ⌃⇧G, and on a Mac Argus writes every key that way — in the list, on the buttons, in its notices. Command is left alone on purpose: a browser on a Mac owns nearly every ⌘ combination (⌃⌘G, for one, is Chrome's find).

Learning them without learning a list

• On the button. Hover a button that has a key and its tooltip ends with it: Sessions · Ctrl+Alt+S.
• Hold Ctrl (⌃) a moment, alone. Every button on screen that has a key shows it, as a badge on its corner: only the letter, in the colour of its chord — blue Ctrl+Alt (the side rail), green Ctrl+Shift (this desk), violet Ctrl+Alt+Shift (arrangements) — and the legend at the bottom says the chords once. Let go and they are gone; another key or a click puts them away too. Ctrl alone types nothing, so it works over a terminal as well.
• After a click. Click something that has a key and a notice says Sessions — next time: Ctrl+Alt+S, the first three times, then never again for it; using the key once counts as learnt. Not on a phone, which has no Ctrl.
• Both are in Settings → Look (Hold Ctrl to see the shortcuts, Teach me the shortcuts).

Two modifiers, and which one says where you are going

They were bare letters once — f for Files, w for Windows — and the rule above was meant to keep them out of the way. It is not enough: plenty of the app is neither a terminal nor a text box (a listing you are reading, a document, the journal), and a letter pressed while looking at one opened a screen you did not ask for.

Ctrl on its own was the next attempt, and it lasted a day. A browser owns nearly every Ctrl+letter there is, and owns them at a level a page cannot argue with: Ctrl+F is find, Ctrl+L is the address bar, Ctrl+E is the search box, Ctrl+1…9 switches tabs. When the terminal has the keyboard — which is most of the time — the browser gets them first.

So the modifier says which question you are asking:

• Ctrl+Alt is the sidebar — the screens down the side, which is a place you go.
• Ctrl+Shift is the desk you are on — a window opened in it, or moving between desks.
• Ctrl+Alt+Shift is how the desk is arranged — grid, columns, rows, your own. A third modifier because they are a third kind of thing, and because two are no longer enough: every pair a browser has not taken is one it has.

?	this list — the one bare key, because it is what you press when lost
F11	full screen
Alt+V	which Argus is running: version, commit and date, a pull waiting for a restart, a newer release, the plugin in each agent
Ctrl+Shift+G	Got it, all — set every waiting agent aside
Ctrl+Alt+F	Files
Ctrl+Alt+S	Sessions
Ctrl+Alt+W	Windows
Ctrl+Alt+P	Prompts
Ctrl+Alt+Y	System
Ctrl+Alt+,	Settings
Ctrl+Alt+A	While you were away
Ctrl+Alt+O	To do
Ctrl+Alt+V	Placeholders
Ctrl+Alt+J	Journal
Ctrl+Alt+B	show or hide the file sidebar
Ctrl+Alt+→ Ctrl+Alt+←	the next or previous screen in the sidebar, wrapping at the ends
Ctrl+Shift+X	New session — an agent or a shell
Ctrl+Shift+M	a team of agents
Ctrl+Shift+H	the list of this desk's windows
Ctrl+Shift+E	a new file browser in this desk
Ctrl+Shift+L	the link tray
Ctrl+Shift+Y	the prompts window
Ctrl+Shift+] Ctrl+Shift+[	next and previous desk — Ctrl+Shift+→ Ctrl+Shift+← do the same
Ctrl+Shift+1…9	that desk, by its number. Alt+1…9 as well
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G	arrange as a grid
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K	as columns
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J	as rows
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U	back to your own arrangement

The desk's shortcuts press the desk's own buttons by their label as shown, in your language: until 2026-10-06 they looked for the English words, and in an Italian, Spanish or French Argus they did nothing at all. Every one on the list can be changed: press ?, press the row, hold the new keys. Fixed, and not on the list: Ctrl+Shift+1…9 and Alt+1…9 (a desk by number), Ctrl+Shift+→/← (next/previous desk), Ctrl+Alt+→/← (next/previous screen).

C for columns and R for rows are the obvious letters and both are spoken for — Ctrl+Shift+C is the element picker, Ctrl+Shift+R is a hard reload — so J and K, where a vim hand already is.

AltGr was tried and taken out. It is the one modifier no browser has claimed, and it is also not one key — Linux sends AltGraph, Windows sends Ctrl+Alt, some keyboards have none — so reading it meant dropping the ctrl and alt reported alongside it, and an ordinary Ctrl+Alt shortcut could have stopped working on a keyboard where right-Alt is AltGr. It could not be tested either: that modifier cannot be produced by anything except a real key. Three modifiers it is.

Two ways to a desk by number is not indecision: Ctrl+1…9 belongs to the browser's tabs and Ctrl+Shift+1…9 does not, while Alt+1…9 is free nearly everywhere — between them, one of the two works wherever you are. Installed as an app the browser has no tabs to switch and no address bar to focus, and very nearly all of them arrive.

If yours still swallows one, change it — every shortcut on the list can be.

Four groups, two columns, and a box to search them

The list is grouped the way the scheme is — Everywhere, The sidebar, This desk, Arrangements — because twenty-seven rows in one column read as twenty-seven unrelated facts, and four short lists read as a rule you can remember without opening the sheet again. Over 820px it is two columns, with the headings spanning both. The box at the top hides what does not match, headings included, for when you know the word and not the key.

Switching one off

The cross at the end of a row switches that shortcut off: it says off, and the key does nothing until you give it one again — the same cross puts its usual key back. Backspace does it too, while a row is listening.

It stores nothing rather than deleting your choice, and the difference matters: deleting a choice restores the shipped key, which is how a shortcut you thought you had cleared went on firing. Put the original keys back still undoes the lot.

Changing one

Open the list, click the row, and hold the combination you want — the row says press the keys… while it waits, and records what you actually pressed. Nothing to type, no spelling of modifier names, and no way to write down a combination your keyboard cannot produce.

With a modifier held it records the key you pressed, not the character it would have typed. Shift makes E out of e, and Alt composes on some layouts, so a combination stored by its character comes back as ctrl+E — unreadable, and the same thing as Ctrl+E on a keyboard where both make that letter. Held down, it is read off the physical key and Shift is named like any other modifier. Nothing held, nothing changes: ? is ?.

A modifier on its own is not a combination: holding Ctrl fires a key press of its own, and taking it would record ctrl+control and stop listening before you had reached the letter you meant. So it waits for the whole thing.

Backspace on a row clears its shortcut, Escape leaves it alone, and Put the original keys back undoes the lot.

Your choices are kept with your other preferences on the server, so every device you open Argus on gets the same keys.

In a file listing

Not on the list above, because they belong to the listing you last touched rather than to the app: Delete deletes the files chosen (one question), Ctrl+A chooses them all, Escape lets go, Ctrl/⌘+click and Shift+click choose. They do nothing while you are typing, in a terminal, or with a dialog open. See Files.