Keyboard Shortcuts

Front Porch AI keeps keyboard handling deliberately small. There are only a handful of real shortcuts — everything else follows your operating system's normal behavior.

Throughout this page: on macOS use ⌘ Command; on Windows and Linux use Ctrl.

The One That Matters

That's the whole trick to writing multi-paragraph messages: hold Shift when you press Enter.

A stray Enter won't fire off an empty message. Sending only happens when the box actually has something in it (text, or a photo you attached), a character or group is open, and a reply isn't already being written.

Regenerate the Last Reply

This works while the message box has focus, and it's ignored while a reply is still streaming in. If you already deleted the last reply, it writes a fresh one from your last message instead. It behaves the same way in group chats.

Don't go hunting the chat toolbar for a matching button, though. The Generate reply button — the one whose tooltip spells out the shortcut — only appears in a 1:1 chat when your own message is the last one in the thread, which is the "I deleted the reply" case. For the everyday re-roll, the click equivalent is the small refresh icon (Regenerate) tucked under the last reply.

The keyboard shortcut is desktop app only — the browser/phone UI has the ⟳ buttons, just no hotkey for them yet.

Editing a Message

Click the pencil (Edit message) on any bubble and the editor has its own two keys. They're printed in the bottom-right corner of the dialog so you can't lose them:

These behave the same in the desktop app and the browser UI.

The Stoop Messages

The mod-message composer on The Stoop works like the chat box:

Standard Text Editing

Every text field in the app (chat box, character editor, story editor…) supports your system's normal editing keys:

Esc closes most dialogs and Tab moves focus between controls — standard behavior on every platform. In the small single-line prompts (renaming a folder, searching for a model, typing a tag), Enter confirms instead of adding a line.

On macOS the usual menu-bar items are there too: ⌘Q to quit, ⌘H to hide, ⌘M to minimize, ⌃⌘F for full screen. One thing to know: "Preferences…" (⌘,) in the app menu does nothing — it's a leftover from the standard macOS app template that I never wired up. Settings lives in the left sidebar.

In the Browser and on Your Phone

The web/mobile UI shares the same message keys (Enter sends, Shift + Enter makes a new line) whenever you have a real keyboard attached. On a phone you'll usually just tap Send.

A few extras that only exist in the browser UI:

Everything Else Is a Click

Actions like flipping between alternate greetings, Director Mode, forking a chat from a message, and voice input are buttons in the chat interface rather than hotkeys. Navigation (Home, The Stoop, Manage Models, Settings, User Persona, Worlds, Backups & Restore, and so on) lives in the left sidebar.

The app doesn't register any system-wide hotkeys — nothing triggers while Front Porch AI is in the background.

If there's a shortcut you wish existed, tell me on Discord — this is the kind of thing user requests genuinely shape.