Command palette & keyboard shortcuts

Press ⌘K — CtrlK on Windows and Linux — anywhere in CompassDocs to open the command palette. It floats in front of whatever you were doing, so you can look something up mid-sentence in the editor without losing your place: nothing navigates until you pick a result, and Esc puts you back exactly where you were.

One box searches everything you’re allowed to see:

• Documents, ranked the same way search ranks them.
• People from the directory — name, email, job title, or department, with photos.
• Spaces, by name.
• Navigation — every destination in the left-hand rail, including the ones buried behind a scroll.
• Actions — new document, new space, add a user, backups, audit log, import & export, toggle dark mode, and more.

Before you type a thing, the palette offers the documents you opened most recently, ordered so the ones you keep coming back to sit at the top. That history lives in your own browser, keyed to your account, and never leaves it.

Modes

Typing one character first narrows the palette to a single kind of result. The mode shows as a chip next to the box; Backspace on an empty query removes it.

Key	Mode	Searches
/	Documents	Titles, summaries, tags, and body text
@	People	Name, email, job title, department
>	Actions	Things to do rather than places to go
#	Spaces	Space names
?	Help	The shortcut sheet — see below

Tab and ShiftTab cycle through the modes if you’d rather not remember the characters.

Global shortcuts

These work anywhere in the app — from the dashboard, a document, a settings page, wherever you are.

Keys	Does
⌘K / CtrlK	Open the command palette
/	Open it in document mode
@	Open it in people mode
>	Open it in action mode
#	Open it in space mode
?	Show every shortcut you have
c	Create a document

Jump anywhere: g then a letter

Press g, release it, then press a second key to go straight to a section of the app.

Chord	Goes to
g h	Dashboard (home)
g a	Ask
g p	People directory
g l	Links
g s	Service status
g t	Training
g r	Review queue
g n	Announcements
g c	Compliance
g ,	Settings

Inside the palette

Keys	Does
↑ ↓	Move between results
Enter	Open the highlighted result
⌘Enter / CtrlEnter	Open it in a new tab
Tab / ShiftTab	Next / previous mode
Backspace	Clear the mode filter
Esc	Close the palette

In the editor

Keys	Does
⌘S / CtrlS	Save the document

See Writing & editing for how CompassDocs protects unsaved work.

The shortcut sheet

Press ? at any time for the complete list — generated from the same registry the shortcuts themselves come from, so it can never drift out of date. It’s searchable: type train and it shows you g t.

The sheet names the right modifier for the machine you’re on. macOS readers see ⌘; Windows and Linux readers see Ctrl.

You only get the shortcuts you can use

Bindings follow your permissions. If your role can’t approve changes there is no review queue to jump to, so g r isn’t bound and the sheet doesn’t list it — no shortcut leads to a page that will turn you away. The same goes for admin-only actions and for modules your workspace hasn’t enabled.

Shortcuts never interrupt typing

Single-key shortcuts are suppressed whenever a keystroke belongs to something else:

• While the cursor is in the editor, a text box, a select, or any contenteditable area.
• While another dialog or overlay is open — that layer owns the keyboard, and Esc closes only the top one.
• While an input method editor is composing (typing Japanese, Chinese, or Korean).

On European keyboard layouts, @, >, and # are typed with AltGr. CompassDocs recognizes those as ordinary characters rather than modified keystrokes, so the mode keys work on German, French, Polish, and other AltGr layouts.

If you’d rather click

Everything the palette does is reachable with a mouse. The search affordance at the top of the sidebar opens it — in both the wide rail and the icon-only one — and it shows the keyboard hint for your platform. On a phone, tap the search icon in the header.