Hotkeys

Three kinds of hotkey

Triplo has three separate hotkey systems. They live in the same drawer and look alike, but they do very different things.

How to reach them all. Action grid → Hotkeys. Three collapsible groups, one per tier.

App Hotkeys

Nine built-in shortcuts. Every one can be remapped or switched off individually.

Global means it works anywhere, whatever app you are in. In window means it only fires while Triplo has focus.

There is also a fixed shortcut: Cmd+Tab opens the SmartPrompt picker. It cannot be remapped.

Remapping one

Click the pencil beside it, press your new combination, save. The description is locked — you are changing the key, not the behaviour. The toggle beside each row disables it entirely, which is what you want when one collides with something your OS or another app already uses.

General SmartPrompt hotkeys

What they do. Bring the window up with a chosen SmartPrompt already submitted. The response appears in the chat as normal.

How to create one. Hotkeys drawer → General SmartPrompts → Add hotkey…. Give it a title, the prompt's command, and the key combination.

Use these for prompts that stand alone — a daily standup template, a question you ask often — where you want the answer on screen rather than pasted somewhere.

SmartPrompt hotkeys — background execution

This is the feature most people never find, and the one that changes how Triplo feels. A hotkey attached directly to a SmartPrompt runs it without the window appearing at all, on whatever you have selected, and pastes the result back where your cursor is.

Setting one up

What Triplo does behind the scenes

• Notes which application is frontmost, so the result can be returned to it.
• Waits briefly for you to release the modifier keys before copying — otherwise the held keys interfere with the copy.
• Copies your selection, then restores your previous clipboard.
• Builds the prompt with your Instruction, Mind and language directive applied, exactly as a foreground prompt would be.
• Re-activates the app you were in and pastes at the cursor, replacing your selection.

Example — a rewrite key

Now, in any application: select a bloated paragraph, press Cmd+Shift+T, and it is replaced by a tighter one.

With an Automation instead

When the prompt carries an Automation magnet, nothing is pasted. Triplo extracts the parameters, brings the window forward to confirm, and fires the request. See Automations.

Limits & gotchas

• Do not put //selected// in a prompt you will run by hotkey. The selection is captured automatically; the tag would add it twice.
• Always single-turn. Chat mode does not apply, and nothing is saved to history.
• Nothing is pasted if the response is empty — a failure is silent by design, since a visible error would interrupt whatever you were doing. Enable the status dot to see failures.
• Pasting needs the same OS permission as capture. See Permissions.
• Applications that block synthetic keystrokes — some password managers, some secure fields — will not accept the paste.
• Your selection is replaced. Undo in the target app usually restores it, but a prompt that returns something unexpected has already overwritten your text. Test new hotkey prompts on something disposable.

Conflicts

Triplo checks across all three tiers when you assign a shortcut and names the conflicting item. It cannot, however, see shortcuts owned by your operating system or other applications — those simply fail to register, silently.

Combinations to avoid

Cmd+Shift+ a letter is generally the safest space for your own prompt hotkeys.

A shortcut that does nothing

1. Check it is toggled on in the Hotkeys drawer.
2. Check the SmartPrompt itself is active.
3. Try a different combination — if the new one works, the original was claimed by something else.
4. On macOS, confirm Accessibility permission is granted and Triplo has been restarted since.

More in Troubleshooting.