Chapter 14 — Shortcuts and Command Palette

You can drive almost every feature in AidaIDE from the keyboard. This chapter covers the defaults, the Command Palette, the Feature Browser, and how to remap any binding.

Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P)

The fastest path to anything in the IDE. Press Ctrl+Shift+P, start typing.

• Matches against menu items, feature tabs, settings, plugin commands.
• Fuzzy match — "scn host" finds "Network → Host Discovery."
• Enter runs the focused item. Esc closes.
• The palette shows the keyboard shortcut on the right for items that have one — useful for learning bindings.

Feature Browser

View → Feature Browser or the toolbar magnifier.

A pane listing every feature tab grouped by category (Fleet, Network, Security, AI, etc.) with a search box. Better than the Command Palette when you do not yet know what something is called and want to browse.

Each entry has:

• Icon.
• Name.
• One-line description.
• "Open" button.
• License lock icon if gated.

Default shortcuts (selected)

Global

Edit

AI

Tools / Plugins

Editor

(Some F5 paths in connection tab editors double-fire — known minor issue if you bind a second action to F5.)

User Guide viewer (Help → User Guide)

These shortcuts only apply while the in-app User Guide window is focused.

The PDF lands under ~/.aidaide/exports/<chapter>_<timestamp>.pdf (or docs/user_guide/_exports/ when running from source, or your system temp dir if neither is writable). If reportlab is missing the viewer falls back to writing the raw markdown alongside where the PDF would have gone.

Ctrl+Shift+G (📚 Full PDF) writes a single file AidaIDE_User_Guide_<timestamp>.pdf containing every chapter in TOC order. The first two pages are a title page and an auto-generated table of contents whose entries are clickable links to each chapter and major heading. Each chapter starts on a fresh page (page-break-before-H1). Cross-chapter links inside the prose — for example [see Ch.2 §"I don't have an SSH server"](/docs/ssh-devices#i-do-not-have-an-ssh-server--setup-paths) — resolve to in-PDF anchors, and https:// URLs in chapter prose become clickable. The footer carries a global "Page N of M". Without reportlab, the fallback writes one concatenated .md file instead.

Chapters that include screenshots use Markdown's standard ![alt text](path/to/image.png) syntax — the viewer renders these inline (via Pillow) up to a 720px width ceiling. Captions appear in dim italic below the image. PDF export embeds the same images at page width.

These bindings are hard-coded in the viewer (not user-rebindable from File → Keyboard Shortcuts…) — the viewer is a small Toplevel and intentionally keeps its bindings local. If you want different keys, the source is ui/user_guide_viewer.py.

Customising shortcuts

File → Keyboard Shortcuts… (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+S) opens the shortcuts editor:

• Searchable list of every command in AidaIDE.
• Each row shows current binding, command ID, default binding, and a category.
• Click a row → press the new key combo → it is bound. Esc cancels.
• Conflicts highlight in red. The previous binding is unbound automatically when you confirm.

Saved bindings live in ~/.aidaide/keybindings.json and persist across launches.

Resetting

• Right-click a row → Reset to Default.
• Bottom of the dialog → Reset All to Defaults wipes the file.

Importing / exporting

• Export — saves your binding file. Share with teammates for consistency.
• Import — overlays an imported file onto current bindings.

Recurring binding traps

If a shortcut does not seem to do anything, check the following — these are known patterns:

• Multiple bindings to the same command — kbm-level and widget-level can both bind, and one returns None while the other handles. Re-bind through the editor; conflicts surface in red.
• Binding declared but never wired — a small set of edit.* / selection.* / go.* commands are declared in the default shortcuts file but not actually registered to handlers (about 41 are known). They show up as customisable but pressing the key does nothing. File a bug if you depend on one.
• Ctrl+Shift+H confusion — opens the Hierarchy Builder, but the default shortcut declaration calls it edit.replaceInFiles in some builds. The Settings UI label may lie until this is sorted. H