What keyboard shortcuts do you want most?

[ten9876]

Keyboard Shortcuts — Tell Us What You Need

We've just shipped the first batch of keyboard shortcuts in v0.6.0 (enable via View → Keyboard Shortcuts):

Key	Action
Left / Right	Nudge frequency by step size
Shift+Left / Shift+Right	Nudge frequency by 10× step
Up / Down	AF gain ±5
T	Toggle MOX (TX on/off)
M	Toggle mute
[ / ]	Cycle step size down / up
L	Toggle tune lock
Spacebar	TX (currently toggle, held-PTT planned)

Shortcuts are off by default to prevent accidental TX or tuning. Enable them in View → Keyboard Shortcuts.

We want your input!

Before we build a full shortcut manager (customizable key bindings), we want to know:

1. Which shortcuts are most important to you? (rank your top 5)
2. What's missing? Band change hotkeys? Mode switching? Filter width? AGC?
3. Do you prefer the PowerSDR QWEASD layout (top row = up, home row = down, left-to-right = coarse-to-fine)?
4. Should shortcuts be per-profile? (different bindings for contest vs casual operating)
5. Do you use a MIDI controller or external knob? Should we support those too?
6. Held spacebar PTT vs toggle? PowerSDR used held-spacebar for PTT. Some ops prefer toggle.

Some ideas from the community and other SDR clients:

Shortcut	Action
Q/A, W/S, E/D, R/F	PowerSDR-style ±1M, ±100k, ±10k, ±1k
1-9	Quick band select (1=160m, 2=80m, ...)
F1-F12	CW memories / voice keyer
Ctrl+Left/Right	Filter width adjust
Tab	Cycle between slices
Escape	Cancel TX / stop tune
G	Go to frequency (direct entry)
B	Open band selector
N	Toggle NR
A	Toggle AGC

Please reply with your wish list. We'll use this to prioritize the shortcut manager implementation.

73, Jeremy KK7GWY & Claude (AI dev partner)

[jensenpat]

Thank you Jeremy for your work on this feature.

Please prioritize G as "Go To Frequency", this should move focus into the Slice frequency box, allow you to type a frequency and press the enter key, and then return focus back to the panadapter.

This will put a bow on full laptop keyboard navigation, and put the focus on future mode and filter selector shortcuts work.

[JonathanPerkins]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for this. Yes I am very much in favour of adding MIDI support:

• there are custom devices like the CTR2-MIDI and HaliKey-MIDI that provide really good solutions to interfacing with SDR software
• there's a wide range of generic music MIDI control devices that would also work
• using MIDI key events for CW keyer support* works better than serial handshaking. I've done quite a lot of testing across Windows and MacOS with other software developers and using MIDI for connecting CW paddles provides lower latency and more reliable operation than USB serial handshaking (not generically supported in Windows with custom drivers, MacOS Tahoe drops handshaking events randomly).

Perhaps the software should be architectured to support various physical interfaces (keyboard, MIDI, serial,...) sending events to a configurable "router" that interfaces to VFOs, PTT control etc. So rather than have a widget to configure just keyboard mapping, it also includes mapping of MIDI key events, serial handshaking etc. And the ability to manage these mappings (switch between mappings, import+export) would be great. But I'm sure you've already got good ideas in this direction.

Thanks,
Jonathan G4IVV

*I realise we haven't done anything yet about CW keyer support, but I'm thinking ahead Hi. I hope this might be an area I could contribute to if I can get comforatble with working with Claude.

[ten9876]

I have a numark dj2go2 controller that I could try to make work.

[birtong]

Running 0.8.2 on MacBook Pro M2. MANY things are running very well :) Would like to use my Halikey V1 to interface my CW paddle. Tried various setting in the serial tool but did not find a working solution. Has anyone found a way to use the Halikey with AetherSDR?

Also looked for it in the MIDI tool and did not see it.

TIA

[williamscody]

@birtong have you figured this out? I also have a HaliKey V1 running on my M2 Studio Mac, and it works great with SmartSDR for Mac.