Shortcuts

Shortcuts are keys that drive Loca without reaching for the mouse, and the most useful ones work even when Loca is not the window you are looking at. They are set under Shortcuts in Settings, and because they reach across your whole desktop, they are a Client feature: they belong to this app on this machine.

What you can bind

The shortcuts cover the actions you want at hand from anywhere:

• Show or hide the window, so Loca is one keypress away no matter what you are doing. This is the same key a Push-to-Talk tap uses to toggle the window.
• Attach a file, to start a message with something from disk without opening the app first.
• Capture the screen, or capture a region of it, to hand the agent what you are looking at as an image in a couple of keystrokes.

Pick the combinations that do not collide with the rest of your system; Loca holds them for as long as it is running.

How It Works

A shortcut that works from any window is a global shortcut, and that is a request the app makes to your operating system: it asks the OS to notify it whenever that key combination is pressed, even while another app is focused. The OS, not Loca, watches the keyboard and forwards the event, which is why a global shortcut keeps working when Loca is hidden, and also why two apps cannot hold the same combination at once. When you change a binding, Loca releases the old combination and registers the new one, so the change takes hold right away.

That is the last of personalizing loca. The remaining chapter is the housekeeping around the app, beginning with The Settings Panel.