Keybindings

synui's defaults. Override in ~/.config/synui/synuirc or /etc/synui/synuirc.

Lost? Super+C opens the control panel — the front door, listing every shortcut, generated from the live bind table so it can't drift from reality. Tapping Super alone opens the start menu.

Launching and the AI

Super+Space is the command bar — the one that takes synsh intents and shows command output. It sits next to Super+Backspace so the two AI popups are side by side on the keyboard.

A command the AI answers with runs sandboxed, in either popup: it can read your files and use the network, but it can only write to /tmp. Asking for an application by name ("open firefox") starts it normally. Without syn-confine installed, the bar shows the command instead of running it.

Super+= is rofi, the application launcher — it lists your installed apps and starts one. Pressing the key again while it is up closes it, so it behaves like the panels below it. Clicking away does not dismiss it, because rofi's Wayland backend cannot see clicks outside its own surface; Escape closes it too. A brief flicker as it opens is upstream's — it detects the monitor scale late.

The toggle is spawn_toggle in the bind table, and it is a general thing: any bind written spawn_toggle <command> closes what it started if the key comes back while it is still running. Plain spawn stays fire-and-forget, which is what you want from the terminal bind — the second press should give you a second terminal.

Want them the other way round? They are ordinary binds with one owner — swap them in the shortcut palette (Super+/, then F2 on each), or with two bind = lines in synuirc. A bind on a combo that already has one replaces it, so the swap is two lines.

⛔ There used to be a Super+Space opens row in the control panel, and a super_space = launcher|cmdbar key to go with it. Both are gone as of synui 0.1.0-338: they were a second place a keybinding was declared and they beat the first, re-seating the pair at the end of every config load — so a chord you moved in the palette was put back at the next login. The key is still parsed, only to log that it is ignored.

rofi follows the desktop theme — a theme switch rewrites its palette, and since rofi starts fresh on every keypress it picks the new colours up immediately.

Super+/ is the one to remember if you remember nothing else. It is the same list as this page, filtered as you type, built from the live bind table — so it includes anything you have rebound and cannot go stale. It also answers to Super+?: on a US layout that is Super+Shift+/, and the keyboard hands the compositor a different symbol when Shift is down, so both are bound to the same action. Reach for it either way.

Windows

Touchpad gestures

The action runs when the fingers lift. Two- and three-finger gestures are not touched: scrolling, pinch-to-zoom and app swipes work as before.

Each gesture is a bind, set in synuirc:

gesture = swipe:4:left  ws next
gesture = swipe:3:up    spawn syntty
gesture = pinch:4:in    overview open
ungesture = swipe:4:down

swipe takes 3–5 fingers and left right up down; pinch takes 2–5 fingers and in out. The action is anything a bind = line takes, and ungesture removes a default. Binding any direction of a finger count takes every swipe with that many fingers away from apps.

Control panel ▸ Input ▸ Touchpad gestures turns them all off at once, which hands every gesture back to apps. synctl gestures prints the table synui is using. Gestures do nothing on the lock screen or while a window is being moved or resized.

Super+J/K walk stacking order; Alt+Tab walks MRU. That difference is the whole reason both exist.

Super+Tab does not switch windows — it switches layouts. The seven and what each one does are in The Desktop → Layouts.

Super+, and Super+. are the only two keys that do nothing on six of the seven layouts, and that is not a bug: the others have no columns to move a window between. On niri they are the whole point — everything else is walking along the strip, which Super+Shift+J/K already does.

Look and feel

See The Desktop, Wallpapers, Window Effects, Cursor Themes, Sound Themes.

System

The three speech keys are the reason they are keys at all. A screen reader that can only be started from a terminal is not one — the person who needs it is the person who cannot read the terminal to start it. And Super+Shift+U toggles rather than having an off chord of its own: a reader talking over you has to be stoppable with the key you just pressed, not by remembering a different one.

All three spawn syn-speak and vibe rather than doing the talking themselves — the speech stack lives there, and a compositor that grew its own would be a third voice on the machine. On a box without them the key spawns a command that is not there, which costs a log line and nothing else.

The voices, the rate, what to install where nothing speaks, and why this is an announcer rather than a full screen reader: Speech and dictation.

Super+T used to be the task manager. It is the theme manager now — the task manager had two binds and needed one, and Ctrl+Alt+Delete is the one everybody already reaches for. (logind's Ctrl+Alt+Del handling is a VT/console thing, so inside a Wayland session the key reaches the compositor.)

Media and hardware keys

Bare keys, no modifier — they are dedicated keys and nothing else claims them.

Bare-key binds matter for hardware like USB volume knobs, which report plain KEY_VOLUMEUP/KEY_VOLUMEDOWN/KEY_MUTE with no modifier held. Before synui had audio binds, those events reached the bind table and matched nothing.

Screenshots

Screenshots land in ~/Pictures/Screenshots and on the clipboard, so you can paste one straight into a chat without opening the file.

Note: Print arrives as Sys_Req when Alt is held — that's an X11ism, not a bug.

Rebinding

bind = super+shift+z spawn my-script

in synuirc. Actions are the names the default table uses (term, cmdbar, theme, sounds, widgets, cursor, alt_tab, …), plus spawn <command>.

No comma. The line is split on the first whitespace — everything before it is the combo, everything after is the action and its argument. A trailing comma becomes part of the key name, and z, is not a keysym, so the whole bind is dropped (synui logs bind: bad key).

Punctuation keys are spelled by name, because the combo is split on + and a literal = or + cannot be the key. Use the XKB keysym name: equal, minus, comma, period, slash. The command bar's default is bind = super+equal cmdbar — super+= does not work.

A duplicate combo is not a conflict anyone sees — it is the older feature silently going dead. handle_keybinding takes the first match. synui logs DUPLICATE default bind at startup for exactly this reason: adding night_light on super+shift+n once killed minimize_restore, and it only turned up because the table happened to get grepped.

The gaming keys

They are there on a fresh install as of 0.2.9 — your session runs syn-arcade binds ensure, which refreshes the block in synuirc if there is one and writes it if there is not. Before that they lived only in a synuirc somebody had run binds install against, so Super+F10, F11 and F12 did nothing at all on a machine nobody had configured.

syn-arcade binds                             # are they installed, and which
syn-arcade binds install --toggle=super+u --cycle=super+y     # or pick your own
syn-arcade binds remove                      # and a block you removed stays removed

They land in synuirc as ordinary bind = lines, which is deliberate: it makes them defaults like any other, so the Super+/ palette can rebind them and Ctrl+Shift+R does not wipe them the way it would a palette rebind.

They toggle the overlay inside a game that is already running — see Gaming for why that is possible.

Two things that will confuse you if you hit them

Super+Shift+F exists because "fullscreen" is a lie. Some games (Doom KEX with v_windowmode=1) are borderless windowed and never send _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN, so the compositor correctly tiles them and you assume synui is broken. Either set the game to true fullscreen (v_windowmode=2) or force it with Super+Shift+F.

Set a primary output if games open on the wrong monitor. Xwayland used to mark no primary output, so SDL fell back to connector order and games opened on whichever panel happened to be first. Super+D → p, or primary=1 in outputs.conf.

See also: synui, Commands.