Changing key bindings from the palette

You don't have to edit a JSON file to rebind a key. Every command in the command palette can be given a shortcut — or have one taken away — from inside fman, in the same Shift+Enter menu that edits a command's keywords and name.

The three screens

Open the palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), find the row you want, then press Shift+Enter instead of Enter and choose Change key bindings for "…".

Screen	What it offers	Enter	Escape
Entry menu	Change keywords, Change key bindings, Rename to…	opens the shortcut list	back to the palette
Shortcut list	Add shortcut…, then one row per shortcut	Add asks you to press a key; a shortcut opens the menu below	back to the palette
Shortcut menu	Remove, Go back	unbinds the shortcut, or returns	back to the shortcut list

The shortcut list marks where each binding came from:

Add shortcut...
Ctrl+Alt+P  (yours)
F5  (default)

(yours) is a binding from your own file — yours to delete. (default) is one fman ships; removing it works differently (below).

Adding a shortcut

Add shortcut… opens a small dialog and waits for you to press the combination — you never type the string, so there is no way to misspell PgDown or Num+Down. Press Escape to back out.

If the combination already runs something else, fman names that command and asks whether to take the key over:

F5 currently runs copy. Bind it to "Pack" instead?

Answering yes is honest about what happens: your binding is written to the front of your own file, and fman dispatches the first match it finds, so yours wins and copy loses F5. Answering no changes nothing.

Changes take effect immediately — no restart, and no reload_plugins.

Removing a shortcut

Pick a shortcut, then Remove. What that means depends on where it came from:

• One of yours is deleted from your file outright.
• A shipped default cannot be deleted — fman never writes to the files it ships. It is shadowed instead: removing F5 writes a binding of F5 to the do_nothing command, which is a real command that does exactly that. The key stops working, the palette stops advertising it, and you can see why by reading your file.

do_nothing is invisible in the palette — it is a target for this, not an action you would ever run.

Viewer commands

The viewer palettes have the same Shift+Enter, and this is where it earns its keep: most viewer commands (video_mute, viewer_next_file, image_actual_size, …) ship with no default key at all, so binding them used to mean creating a file by hand.

Viewer bindings are written to Viewer Key Bindings (<OS>).json, a separate file from the global one. The editor picks the right file from which palette you opened it in; there is nothing to choose.

Removing a viewer default (Space for play/pause, say) shadows it with do_nothing just like a global one, and the viewer honours that instead of falling through to its built-in key.

Where your edits are stored

%APPDATA%/fman/Plugins/User/Settings/Key Bindings (Windows).json — the per-OS user file, and the same one you would edit by hand. Viewer bindings land beside it in Viewer Key Bindings (Windows).json. On macOS and Linux the folder and the (Mac) / (Linux) suffix change; nothing else does.

The editor only ever writes that one file, so everything it does is reversible by deleting a line from it. After each write fman reloads its settings, which is what makes a new binding live without a restart.

Two things it can't do

• Bind Escape. Escape cancels the capture dialog, so it can never be recorded. Add it by hand if you really want it.
• Spot a differently-spelled duplicate. Shortcuts are compared as plain strings throughout fman, so a hand-written Shift+Ctrl+P and a captured Ctrl+Shift+P look like two unrelated keys — the conflict prompt won't fire and both entries stay in the file. The dialog always writes one canonical modifier order, so this only bites files you edited yourself.