Keyboard-first LADLE.

LADLE is designed to be usable primarily from the keyboard. Once you commit to it — for a week, say — the mouse-based flow starts to feel slow. This is the tour.

The eight shortcuts

Memorize these first. Everything else builds on them.

- **⌘K** — open the command palette. Fuzzy-search across chats, actions, navigation. - **⌘/** — open the keyboard-shortcuts overlay. When you forget any of the others, this is where they live. - **⌘⇧O** — new chat. Immediate. Composer is focused. - **⌘⇧T** — new temporary chat. Same, but nothing persists. - **⌘.** — focus the composer. Works from anywhere in the app. - **⌘,** — open Settings. - **⏎** in composer — send. **⇧⏎** — new line. - **Esc** — close whatever's open / stop streaming / cancel edit.

That's it. Eight bindings run the whole product.

The palette-driven flow

The palette (⌘K) is the second-most-used surface after the composer. Everything you might want to do is reachable through it:

- Type "settings" → Enter → Settings. - Type "design" → Enter → new design chat. - Type "shortcut" → Enter → shortcuts overlay. - Type "share" → Enter → share the current chat. - Type ANY chat title fragment → Enter → open that chat.

The palette does fuzzy match, so "sched" surfaces both "Open Scheduled" and any chat with "scheduled" in the title. Learn to trust it; it's faster than clicking.

The reading flow

Once you're in a chat, the sidebar and header can disappear from your attention. Keyboard-driven reading:

- **j / k** — move focus between assistant replies (up / down). - **c** — copy the focused reply. - **s** — star the focused reply. - **r** — regenerate the focused reply (creates a sibling branch). - **← / →** — switch between sibling branches when they exist. - **?** — trigger second opinion on the focused reply.

The pattern: mouse never enters the equation. You read, you decide, you act, you scroll to the next.

The composition flow

At the composer, the tools popover (attach, mic, model/think/search/style) is one Tab away from focused input. Once you know it's there, you rarely need to reach for it — most conversations don't require flipping toggles.

For prompts that DO need a toggle: Tab to the tools icon, Enter, arrow-key to the row, Enter to toggle, Esc to close, back at the composer. Four keys, no mouse.

Two moments the mouse still wins

**Choosing between siblings.** When a message has three regenerate branches and you want to visually compare their opening lines, arrow-keying between them is slower than clicking. The mouse's spatial memory helps.

**Design mode.** Iterating a design involves reading a visual preview, which is a mouse-native activity. Dictating changes into the composer works, but you'll want the mouse for the preview scroll.

Everything else, keyboard wins.

The week-of-commitment

The hard part of switching to keyboard-first is the first week. Muscle memory takes a while to build. The trick: hide your mouse pointer by moving it off-screen and force yourself to feel the friction when you reach for it. In three days you'll have most of the eight shortcuts memorized. In seven, the palette will feel natural.

The reward isn't speed (though speed is real). The reward is that the tool disappears — you stop thinking about how to do things and start thinking about what you're doing.

The tell-tale sign

You know the workflow has clicked the day you catch yourself using ⌘K to open a settings pane when you happen to already be one keystroke away from clicking the same thing in the sidebar. Your hand went to ⌘K before your eye found the mouse. That's the whole trick.