Keyboard, palette & tour

The inspector is keyboard-first. One registry declares every binding; the ? cheat sheet and the client keymap are both generated from it, so the overlay can never drift from the real bindings. (The full cross-surface contract for other Sonaloop apps lives in the core repo: docs/keyboard-conventions.md.)

Bindings

Keys	Scope	Action
?	Global	Open/close the shortcuts cheat sheet
⌘K / Ctrl+K	Global	Open the command palette
g h	Global	Go home
g p	Global	Go to personas
g c	Global	Go to councils
g s	Global	Go to syntheses/reports
g a	Global	Go to activity
g r	Global	Go to runs
g d	Global	Go to documentation
Esc	Global	Close overlays (incl. an open slide-over); cancel a pending chord
j / k	Lists & project outline	Move row focus down/up
Enter	Lists & project outline	Open the focused row as a slide-over (full detail page, real URL)
o	Lists & project outline	Open the focused row straight as a full page
[ / ]	Detail	Previous / next sibling record

The slide-over is the row's full detail page in a right-hand panel (see the live inspector): Enter opens it (the URL becomes the real detail URL), Esc or Back closes it, and the ⤢ control expands to the full page — middle-click and deep links bypass the panel entirely.

Behavior rules worth knowing:

• Typing guard — every binding is disabled while focus is in an input, textarea, select or contenteditable element (Esc may still close an overlay, but never clears your text).
• No modifier shadowing — plain-key bindings never fire while ⌘/Ctrl/Alt is held, so native browser shortcuts stay untouched.
• Chords — g opens a short (~900 ms) chord window; an unknown second key or Esc cancels silently.
• The modifier glyph renders ⌘ on macOS and Ctrl elsewhere.

The command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K)

One registry-driven search over everything in the database — projects, personas, open questions, references, councils, reports, prototypes, flows, sections, notes, sessions, hypotheses, decisions, surveys and assets — plus jump commands derived from the navigation (including pages added by extensions). Type to filter, Enter to open. Project results represent the current working set: archived jobs are omitted from palette search, just as they are from the Jobs overview and methodology-related job discovery. An archived job remains available when its exact /jobs/{project_id} detail URL is opened; the filter reduces navigation clutter and does not delete evidence.

The product tour (local/single-user Core)

In local/single-user Core, an optional tour loads the onboarding showcase project if needed, then walks real project objects: open question, reference, council, survey, report, flow, prototype, session, hypothesis, decision, note, asset and the Library. It uses anchored spotlights + tooltips, progress dots, Back/Next/Skip; Esc ends it. It never auto-starts:

• Take the tour is available in the user menu and prominent on the empty-database home page.

Steps whose target isn't on the current page are skipped automatically, so the tour works from anywhere.

Shared Postgres row-tenanted Cloud disables the tour and its onboarding-showcase browser loader by default. This keeps prepared customer workspaces focused on their own research and prevents the onboarding surface from adding demo records. An operator can explicitly override the default with SONALOOP_PRODUCT_TOUR_ENABLED.