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MOLTamp keyboard shortcuts every developer should know

· · 4 min read

A reference card for the shortcuts that actually matter in daily use. Print it, pin it, memorize five.

MOLTamp keyboard shortcuts every developer should know

You can drive MOLTamp entirely with the mouse. Most of the people I know who use it that way are slower for it. The whole point of a terminal-first tool is that your hands stay on the keyboard, and MOLTamp respects that even though it has a graphical chrome wrapped around the terminal.

Here are the shortcuts that actually matter — the ones I use every day, ranked by how much I would notice if they were missing.

The five you must memorize

Cmd+K — Open the command palette

This is the single most important shortcut. The command palette gives you fuzzy access to every action in MOLTamp without needing to remember where it lives. Switch skins, change layouts, open settings, toggle widgets, jump to a session, anything. Treat it like VS Code's command palette and you will be at home immediately.

Cmd+, — Open settings

Universal across macOS apps and MOLTamp respects the convention. Lands you in the settings panel — Skins, Layout, Agents, Widgets, etc. all in one place.

Cmd+\\\\ — Toggle the left sidebar

When you want full-width terminal for a heavy session, hit this. The left intel panel slides away. Hit again to bring it back. Combine with Cmd+Shift+\\\\ for the right panel.

Cmd+T — New session

Spawns a fresh agent session in a new tab. Each session has its own state — agent context, history, working directory. The tab strip across the top shows all open sessions. Cmd+1 through Cmd+9 jump to specific tabs.

Cmd+Enter — Submit input from the input bar

If you are using the structured input bar (instead of typing directly in the terminal), Cmd+Enter is the universal "send this to the agent" key. Shift+Enter inserts a newline.

The next ten worth learning

  • Cmd+L — Clear the terminal
  • Cmd+R — Restart the current session (preserves cwd)
  • Cmd+Shift+L — Switch to the next layout preset
  • Cmd+Shift+S — Switch to the next skin
  • Cmd+Option+I — Open developer tools (for debugging skins)
  • Cmd+/ — Toggle the bottom bar
  • Cmd+] — Jump to next session
  • Cmd+[ — Jump to previous session
  • Cmd+W — Close current session (with confirm if it has running work)
  • Cmd+Q — Quit MOLTamp (with confirm if any sessions are running)

The three I always forget

These are the shortcuts I keep meaning to memorize and never quite get there:

  • Cmd+Option+R — Reload the active skin (useful when you are iterating on skin CSS)
  • Cmd+Option+M — Toggle the music widget
  • Cmd+Option+V — Toggle the visualizer

The ones I forget tend to be the optional widgets, not the core shortcuts. If you actually use the music or visualizer widgets daily, you will remember these. I use them weekly so I keep retraining myself.

Customizing keybindings

MOLTamp lets you remap any shortcut. Settings → Keybindings shows the full list and you can rebind by clicking the binding and pressing your new combo. Conflicts are flagged in red so you do not accidentally override an existing binding.

A few good rebindings if you have specific tastes:

  • If you came from VS Code, remap Cmd+P to "open command palette" (the default is Cmd+K to match macOS conventions, but VS Code muscle memory dies hard)
  • If you use vim navigation, remap Cmd+H/J/K/L to focus the four panel zones
  • If you use spaces heavily, remap Cmd+Shift+\\[/\\] to jump between MOLTamp instances on different spaces

What I do not customize

I leave the agent-related shortcuts (Cmd+Enter to submit, Cmd+R to restart session, Cmd+L to clear) at their defaults because they are universal across most agent tools. Building muscle memory for agent-specific shortcuts and then breaking them by remapping is a recipe for misery.

Same for the macOS-convention shortcuts (Cmd+, for settings, Cmd+W for close, Cmd+Q for quit). Do not fight the OS.

The shortcut that does not exist yet

The one thing I keep wanting and have not built is a "send this to a different session" shortcut. Right now if I want to take a question from one session and ask it in another, I have to copy-paste. A Cmd+Shift+> to forward the current input to the next tab would save me a real number of keystrokes per week. On the roadmap, not yet shipped.

If you have a shortcut you wish existed, the community Discord is the right place to suggest it.