Global Hotkey
The global hotkey is the front door to Xenocept. From anywhere on your system — your editor, your browser, a video call — pressing it grabs a screenshot of the monitor under your cursor and shows the annotation overlay.
Default Binding
Ctrl + Backquote
Same default on every platform. There is no separate macOS variant.
The current binding lives in /config/settings.json under the hotkey key. Change it from the Settings UI; that writes the new value back to settings.json and re-registers the global shortcut immediately via POST /api/v1/hotkey.
What It Does (Both Directions)
The hotkey toggles the overlay:
| State | Hotkey press |
|---|---|
| Overlay hidden | Capture a fresh screenshot of the monitor under the cursor, then show the overlay. The canvas state is reset — the previous drawing, undo history, and pending comments are dropped. |
| Overlay visible | Hide the overlay. No new capture, no state changes. |
Crucially: pressing the hotkey while the overlay is open is not a “capture again on top of my current work” command. It hides the overlay.
If you want to take a fresh screenshot mid-session, you have to:
- Hide the overlay (press the hotkey, or Esc through any in-progress state).
- Set up the screen the way you want it.
- Press the hotkey again.
But that flow also wipes the current canvas state (because the show cycle resets it). If you wanted to keep what you’d already drawn, your option is to Submit first.
After You Press It
When the overlay shows with a fresh screenshot:
- The screenshot becomes the canvas background.
- The screenshot is also saved to
/screenshots/{filename}.pngin the AeorDB store as an always-on photo-roll, independent of whether you ever Submit. You can find these in the Screenshots list. - The overlay re-pulls user preferences so the active tool, menu opacity, and similar settings reflect any changes you made in the Settings UI since the last capture.
- The canvas plays a brief zoom-in reveal animation.
Cooldown
After the overlay shows, the canvas suppresses input for ~300 ms. The cooldown prevents an immediate click that would happen to coincide with the hotkey press from registering as a drawing action.
Suspending the Hotkey
There’s a POST /api/v1/hotkey/suspend endpoint the frontend uses to temporarily disable the hotkey — for example, while an in-overlay text editor is active and the user might be typing the same key combo. External tooling generally doesn’t need to interact with this.
Conflicts
If another app already owns the binding, Tauri’s global_shortcut.register returns an error and the hotkey is not active. Xenocept logs a warning at startup. The Settings UI surfaces unbound hotkeys so you can pick another combination.
On Wayland, the desktop portal restricts which keys can be globally bound on some compositors. If registration fails repeatedly, try a less-common combination.