Keyboard

Every capture action is reachable from the keyboard alone. Successor choice cards are described in Capture previews; stash behavior in Capture panel; template shelf behavior in Saved templates. Global chord conflicts are in Resolve a Mac Capture hotkey conflict.

Switching panels¶

In either panel, Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab switch to the other panel. From Capture the draft and caret are retained; from Bob Refs the remembered query, scope, filters, selection, and inspector place are restored. The switch works even while a picker, prompt, stash, shelf, or Refs card is open: that surface closes exactly as on a hotkey switch, with the draft and view kept. While IME-composing, the key belongs to the text system; a held key repeats without ping-ponging.

Bob Refs shortcuts¶

These rows act in the Bob Refs panel; Bob Refs and Bob Refs inspector expand them.

Editor and completion keys¶

Capture picker keys¶

While a picker card is open, Return accepts the selected row, Escape cancels, and Backspace on an empty filter removes the trigger. Relation pickers (~ / ~~) treat empty-filter ~ as a live direction flip and Backspace on ~~ as a flip back. Shift-Return inserts the relation token and opens its label card. In the editor, typing | after a relation token opens that card with or without spaces before the pipe; an empty-label Return removes the pipe. Source-specific hints live in Pickers and Relationship pickers.

Successor choices¶

When a preview reports successor offers, Return opens the grouped choice card before anything is written. Space marks the highlighted offer, Command-A marks all, Shift-Return skips with no offers, and Escape returns to the unchanged draft. Full card behavior is in Capture previews.

Inbox routing¶

When a matching preview reports inbox tasks whose status will change, Return opens the route card after any successor choice. Up/Down or Control-N/Control-P moves the destination highlight. Return moves the current task, Control-Return moves it and opens the capture notes, and Shift-Return keeps it in its inbox. Escape goes back one task, then returns to the successor card when one preceded the route card, or to the unchanged draft. Control-T and Control-Backslash are consumed while the route card is open so the template shelf and Pomodoro action cannot take over its modal keys. Full behavior is in Capture previews.

Similar tasks keys¶

While a similar-tasks row is focused, the strip owns its keys and any other key unfocuses first, then passes through unchanged (including ⌘Z and ⌘↩). The footer names the default so the meaning of Return stays visible.

Relation card keys¶

The relation card keeps the search text separate from its highlighted label. Filtering is local after Bob returns the catalog, so moving through labels never starts another completion request.

With one-off on, Return inserts the || form: capturing hides the label from suggestions everywhere. On an existing visible label the card warns in amber before capturing; on an already-hidden label it notes the label stays hidden. Ghost-hide rows read hidden everywhere · ⌃D undo; ghost-unhide rows read visible again · ⌃D undo. Hidden labels stay usable and stay hidden: accepting one inserts the | form with a (stays hidden) footer. An older Bob shows no Hidden pill; Ctrl-D and Ctrl-H give the update hint, and || is never downgraded to |.

Focus¶

Every capture action is reachable from the keyboard alone; the hotkey, editor, completion list, Stash/Capture/Preview/Discard buttons, the Open chip, and stash picker never require a pointer. Opening the Add block ID, Name Pomodoro, or Relation prompt moves keyboard focus into that prompt's field; the field's first responder is owned directly by AppKit rather than SwiftUI focus, and a keystroke arriving while nothing holds focus re-claims the field.

Canceled-draft stash keys¶

The 36-entry upper bound exists so every retained row always has a unique one-key accelerator while reserving D for Delete All: 1 through 9, then 0, then A through C, -, and E through Z.

Saved-template shelf keys¶

Control-T replaces AppKit's transpose-characters shortcut in the capture editor. Inside capture pickers, prompts, and successor choices it is consumed so it never edits or transposes text.

Opening today's Pomodoro (Control-)¶

Control-\ is an in-panel key, not a global hotkey (a global Control-\ would take SIGQUIT from terminals and Vim's Ctrl-\ Ctrl-N). Each press runs a fresh bob capture-pomodoros --format json --all through the pomodoros lane; it does not use the idle-agenda cache. The app never reads the daily note.

Landing rule, from the decoded response:

1. Missing, empty, or relative day_file: status bob sent no daily-note path — update bob; the panel stays open.
2. The entry with is_current: that line, with its ref when valid.
3. Else the first open entry in document order.
4. Else the last completed entry.
5. Else line 1 of the daily note, with no ref.

The chosen destination is dispatched as obsidian://bob-goto-task with path, line, and ref when the entry's ref is valid. A missing or invalid ref builds a line-only URL. Nothing in the vault is written. On success the panel hides and a nonempty draft is retained exactly like Escape: it is never stashed, discarded, or captured. On a failed open, status is Couldn't open Obsidian and the panel stays. A failed fetch is Couldn't read today's Pomodoros. A press while a capture is submitting is Wait for the capture to finish. A press while Bob is unresolved is Bob is not resolved. A second press while a fetch or open is already in flight does nothing. If the panel is hidden before the result lands, the result is dropped. While the stash, saved-template shelf, Add block ID or Name Pomodoro prompt, successor-choice card, or a picker is open, Control-\ is consumed so you finish or cancel that surface first.

Editing the draft¶

Ctrl-J starts the next canonical - row from anywhere in the draft, copying exactly the current authored row's supported indentation (zero or two ASCII spaces). With a collapsed caret at column zero, inside leading whitespace, on either side of the hyphen, after the - prefix, or anywhere through the first body character of a populated - row, Ctrl-J replaces that row's leading whitespace and - prefix with one line terminator while preserving the body. For example, Parent\n|- child and Parent\n- |child both become Parent\n\n|child. Only a caret inside or after the body keeps the normal new-row insertion behavior. On a line that contains only optional whitespace plus one -, *, or + marker, Ctrl-J replaces the placeholder with exactly one blank item separator and puts the caret at the beginning of the following line, reusing an existing line terminator when one is already there. In a template draft, as reported by bob's parse, Ctrl-J inserts a plain newline everywhere in the draft with no indentation and no -. macOS smart-dash substitution is disabled in the draft editor so --3 and -2 stay literal ASCII hyphens; smart quotes are unchanged. Plain Tab first checks for a local editor snippet: with a collapsed caret immediately after --, it replaces those two ASCII hyphens with a single em dash — and leaves the caret right after it, everywhere else in the editor including inside prose. To submit a one-unit earlier shift, type -- and press Return without pressing Tab first. Only when no snippet matches does Tab fall through to bullet indentation. To author a nested row, press Ctrl-J from an existing nested row, or press Ctrl-J for a fresh top-level placeholder and then Tab before or after typing its body to indent it under the preceding first-level bullet. Shift-Tab reverses that, returning a nested bullet to column zero. Tab/Shift-Tab only move a continuation bullet between Bob's two supported source prefixes, exactly two ASCII spaces, so pasted or hand-authored drafts must still use that exact two-space indent; they stop at that ceiling and floor and leave every other line untouched. Ctrl-U deletes from the caret to the beginning of the current physical line, and when the caret is already at that start -- where there is nothing left to delete -- it removes the previous line entirely, so repeated presses walk up the draft line by line and stop on the first line. Backspace on an empty - row removes it in one action instead of requiring two ordinary backspaces. All five shortcuts act on the native text view directly, so undo, IME composition, and accessibility behave exactly as they do for any other edit, and Bob's live parse/preview remains the sole authority for whether the resulting hierarchy is contextually valid. Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E move the caret to the beginning and end of the current physical line, and when the caret is already on that edge they step to the beginning of the previous line or the end of the next one, so repeated presses walk the draft line by line. They stop at the first and last line rather than wrapping around, and because they only move the caret they never touch the draft's text, undo history, or an in-flight IME composition.

Ctrl-Shift-J and Ctrl-Shift-K move the caret to the next and previous physical line, keeping the column it started from: passing through a shorter line clamps the caret to that line's end, and the next press in the same direction restores the original column on the first line long enough to hold it. Any other keystroke, click, or edit resets that remembered column. They stop at the last and first line rather than wrapping around, and like Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E they only move the caret, so they never touch the draft's text, undo history, or an in-flight IME composition. Exact Ctrl-K is again left to AppKit's native delete-to-end-of-paragraph binding, while Ctrl-Shift-K is the custom upward move and Ctrl-U remains Bob's custom line-deleting shortcut.

Command-V intentionally reads only the clipboard's plain-text flavor. Source formatting is discarded because Bob's capture grammar is plain text, and letting AppKit choose a rich HTML/RTF flavor forced a synchronous WebKit HTML import that could cost seconds per paste from browser content. When the caret is at the end of an otherwise empty -, *, or + row and the clipboard begins with a Markdown -, *, or + bullet with a body, Command-V treats that row as the first pasted bullet: the row's marker is kept, the clipboard's first marker is consumed, and the remaining pasted lines are rebased to the row's column-zero or two-space indentation.

Plan rollout
-

Pasting:

- Confirm owner
- Attach checklist

Produces:

Plan rollout
- Confirm owner
- Attach checklist

Every other clipboard shape, selection, caret position, and unsupported indentation still follows ordinary plain-text insertion.