KEYBINDINGS.md

Keyboard & mouse

Every default shortcut, and the mouse gestures the terminal understands. All of them are remappable from the Keyboard Shortcuts editor (gear menu → Keyboard Shortcuts).

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+B	Toggle sidebar
Ctrl+Alt+B	Toggle right sidebar
Ctrl+Shift+E	Focus Explorer
Ctrl+Shift+G	Focus Source Control (git-scm extension)
Ctrl+Shift+F	Focus Search (search extension) when no terminal has focus
Ctrl+Shift+X	Focus Extensions
Ctrl+P	Toggle quick switcher
Alt+J / Alt+K	Select next / previous item in the open quick switcher
Ctrl+Shift+P †	Show command palette
Ctrl+Tab *	Next tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab *	Previous tab
Ctrl+W *	Close active tab
Ctrl+,	Open Settings
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy terminal selection
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C	Copy terminal selection as one paragraph
Ctrl+Shift+F	Scrollback search (terminal focused)
Shift+Enter	Insert a literal newline in the terminal
Ctrl+Alt+↑ / Ctrl+Alt+↓	Jump to the previous / next command (needs shell integration)
Alt+1…Alt+9 ‡	Jump straight to the 1st…9th tab
Ctrl+Shift+PageUp / Ctrl+Shift+PageDown	Move the active tab left / right
Shift+Alt+T	Reopen the last closed tab
Ctrl+= / Ctrl+-	Increase / decrease terminal font size
Ctrl+0	Reset terminal font size
Ctrl+\	Split editor right
Ctrl+1…Ctrl+8 *	Focus the 1st…8th editor group (split pane)
Ctrl+Alt+← / Ctrl+Alt+→ §	Move the active tab into the previous / next editor group
Ctrl+`	Toggle the bottom terminal panel
Ctrl+Shift+`	New terminal in the bottom panel
Ctrl+Shift+Space	Open or minimize the floating terminal; with nothing floating, pick a terminal to float
Alt+← / Alt+→ / Alt+↑ / Alt+↓	Focus the grid cell to the left / right / above / below (only while a grid tab is active; wraps at the edges)
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V	Copy / cut / paste files in the FILES tree (tree focused)
Ctrl+F	Search file names in the FILES tree (tree focused)
F2	Rename the focused file in FILES, or the focused terminal in PROJECTS
Delete	Delete the selected files in FILES, or close the focused terminal or project in PROJECTS

The other grid tab commands (Grid: New Grid, Grid: Tile All Terminals, Grid: Add Terminal, Grid: Focus Next Cell, Grid: Focus Previous Cell, Grid: Toggle Zoom, Grid: Pop Out Cell, Grid: Close Cell) have no default shortcut. Run them from the command palette, or bind them in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor.

Agents: Compose Message… opens the Send to agents composer. It has no default shortcut either; bind it in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor if you use it often. Inside the composer, Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on Mac) sends, Enter adds a line, and Esc closes it.

Project: Open Terminal Setup and Project: Save Terminal Setup (see Project setup file) have no default shortcut.

* Browser-reserved outside the installed PWA — bind a different combo in Keyboard Shortcuts if you're using Perch as a regular browser tab.

† Firefox reserves Ctrl+Shift+P for opening a private window and won't let pages intercept it — rebind it in Keyboard Shortcuts, or just type > into the Ctrl+P quick switcher instead.

‡ Firefox on Linux also binds Alt+1…Alt+9 to its own tab switching and may not let pages intercept them — rebind in Keyboard Shortcuts if that's in the way.

§ GNOME on Linux binds Ctrl+Alt+←/Ctrl+Alt+→ to virtual-desktop switching by default and may not let pages intercept them — rebind in Keyboard Shortcuts if that's in the way.

The command palette also lists seven project/terminal actions — Project: New… (the Open Folder dialog), Project: Close Current, Session: Pin/Unpin Current (adds or removes the current session's folder as a pinned project), Terminal: New, Terminal: Close Current, Terminal: Rename Current…, and Tab: Close Others — that ship with no default key so they don't collide with anything; bind any of them from Keyboard Shortcuts if you use them often. They stay accessible from the sidebar's context menus and hover buttons either way. Terminal: Clear Scrollback and Terminal: Scroll to Bottom likewise ship unbound — assign a chord in Keyboard Shortcuts if you want one.

• Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on Mac) a URL, local file path, or hyperlink in the terminal to open it; add Shift to open a file in its preview viewer instead of the editor.
• Drag in the terminal selects text; when a program is using the mouse (vim, htop), Shift+drag selects instead of sending the drag to it.
• Copy modes (Settings → Terminal → When copying a selection) — Join soft-wrapped lines (the default) undoes the wraps the terminal itself made, while keeping newlines the program actually emitted. Keep lines as shown copies the rows verbatim. Join into paragraphs also undoes a program's own word-wrap, so a paragraph Claude Code or git log wrapped for the pane width comes back as one paragraph — that one is lossy (a code block collapses onto one line), so prefer Copy as Paragraph (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C, or the terminal's right-click menu) to apply it to a single copy without changing the default.
• Shift+scroll (or a trackpad's horizontal scroll) sends horizontal scroll events to nvim.
• Clipboard - copying inside a terminal lands in your browser's clipboard with nothing to configure. Any OSC 52 clipboard-set sequence a program emits is written straight to the browser clipboard, and the terminal advertises that ability (XTGETTCAP Ms), so nvim turns on its built-in OSC 52 provider by itself: "+y, or plain y with clipboard=unnamedplus, just works. Tools that copy by piping into xclip, xsel, wl-copy or pbcopy (like gh auth login copying its one-time code) work too: every terminal has ~/.config/perch/bin first on its PATH, where stand-ins for those tools send the text as OSC 52 when the host has no display, and step aside for the real tool when it has one (the xdg-open stand-in does the same). Copying only goes one way: pasting from the browser clipboard back into a program is not supported, so xclip -o and nvim's "+p come back empty. Paste into the terminal with your browser's paste shortcut or the right-click menu's Paste instead.

All of the above are defaults — remap any of them, including extension-contributed commands, from Keyboard Shortcuts.