OrbitKeys is a native COSMIC / Wayland desktop application that displays context-aware keyboard shortcuts for the currently focused application.

It listens to COSMIC toplevel focus events and dynamically loads shortcut definitions from JSON files based on the active app’s app_id.

This project is intentionally COSMIC-only:

• Context-aware keyboard shortcut display
• Automatically updates when application focus changes
• Manual “Home / Root” mode for desktop-level shortcuts
• Minimal settings overlay
• JSON-based shortcut definitions
• Native Wayland + COSMIC protocols

• COSMIC Desktop Environment
• Wayland
• Rust toolchain (for building from source)

OrbitKeys depends on:

• libcosmic
• COSMIC Wayland protocols
• ext-foreign-toplevel-list
• zcosmic_toplevel_info

It will not work on GNOME, KDE, X11, or other compositors.

cargo build --release

Install with the ./install script. at root.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp target/release/orbitkeys ~/.local/bin/

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications
cp orbitkeys.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/xyz.fonzi.orbitkeys.desktop

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/orbitkeys
cp -r shortcuts ~/.local/share/orbitkeys/

OrbitKeys loads shortcuts based on the focused application's app_id.
Support is driven by JSON files in the shortcuts/ directory.

Currently included shortcut sets:

• Chromium
• Firefox

• Visual Studio Code
• Obsidian
• LibreOffice Writer
• LibreOffice Calc
• LibreOffice Impress
• LibreOffice Draw

• COSMIC Desktop (global / root) on shortcut
• COSMIC Files
• COSMIC Terminal
• COSMIC Editor

• GIMP
• Inkscape
• OBS Studio
• VLC

• Discord
• Slack
• Thunderbird/BetterBird

• Spotify
• Goose (Desktop Goose)

Adding support for new applications is simple:

1. Create a new <app_id>.json file in the shortcuts/ directory
2. Re-install
3. Restart OrbitKeys

Contributions are welcome.

Shortcut files are stored at:

~/.local/share/orbitkeys/shortcuts/<app_id>.json

Example:

{
  "shortcuts": [
    {
      "keys": "Ctrl+C",
      "description": "Copy selection",
      "category": "Editing"
    },
    {
      "keys": "Ctrl+V",
      "description": "Paste clipboard",
      "category": "Editing"
    }
  ]
}

Notes:

• <app_id> must match the Wayland app_id
• category is optional
• Files are loaded dynamically on focus change

Launch OrbitKeys from the COSMIC launcher

OrbitKeys is early but functional.
APIs and behavior may evolve alongside COSMIC.

Contributions and shortcut packs are welcome.

• Window close (❌) may not fully terminate the process
  In some cases, closing the window does not immediately exit the OrbitKeys process. This is currently believed to be caused by the background Wayland focus watcher keeping the process alive after the window is closed. This will be addressed in a future update.

GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPL-2.0)