Hotkey reference

Axion is built for keyboard-first use during a session — switching presets, toggling pedals, opening the tuner — without taking your hands off the guitar. The bindings below are global once the audio engine is running.

The list

When they fire

Two rules govern when a shortcut takes effect:

1. The audio engine must be running. Press Start Audio once after page load and you're good. Until then, all bindings except ? are inert — the rest depend on the rig.
2. No input has focus. Single-key shortcuts (the letters and bracket / number keys, plus ?) suppress themselves if a text input, textarea, select, or contenteditable element is focused. Typing "tuner" in the rename prompt doesn't open the tuner. The ⌘/Ctrl + S family fires even from inputs, because users universally expect "save" to mean "save".

NOTE `F12` is intercepted by every major browser for the devtools panel. We preventDefault it anyway, but in practice you should rebind anything important off F12. The other F-keys are safe.

Pedal bypass — what position is what?

The 1 – 9 keys map to the visible pedal positions left-to-right on the pedalboard. Reordering pedals changes which key bypasses which — the binding is positional, not pedal-typed. Beyond nine pedals the keyboard falls off; we accept that the tenth pedal gets a mouse click.

Recording — W / R / D / Q

The four recording hotkeys all behave the same way:

1. Idle → start a take in the bound mode. Auto-downloads on stop — no save dialog.
2. Already recording → stop the in-flight take regardless of which key was used to start it. Any of W / R / D / Q acts as a universal stop.

Using a hotkey deliberately skips the save-file picker even on browsers that support it (Chrome / Edge / Opera). The reasoning is that you'd usually hit a recording hotkey mid-performance; a modal picker would break that. The trade-off is that the take has to finish before the file lands in your downloads folder (browsers keep the audio in memory until the take stops), so very long hotkey takes will eventually run into the browser's RAM ceiling. For long unattended takes use the on-screen Record button instead — that path keeps the streaming-to-disk flow on supported browsers.

The four modes match the on-screen mode picker:

See Recording your performance for what each tap point actually captures.

Customising F1 – F12 (Pro)

The F-key bindings are user-managed in the key-bindings panel:

1. Open it from the preset bar overflow menu → Key bindings.
2. Click the F-key cell you want to bind.
3. Pick a preset from your saved list.
4. Done — that F-key now loads that preset globally.

Bindings persist in IndexedDB across sessions and survive licence lapses. If Pro lapses they go inert (the data stays — your bindings, your keep — they just don't fire). Restoring Pro re-enables them without any reconfiguration. Bindings that point at a preset you later deleted skip silently.

What's not yet bound

A few candidates we considered and deferred:

• Space — play / pause (we don't have a transport concept; the rig is always "live").
• Letters across the alphabet — collide too often with the browser's quick-find or extension chords. We kept the safe ones (T, M, W, R, D, Q).
• Number-pad keys — would duplicate 1 – 9 but break on laptops without a numpad.
• Per-track looper bindings — arm / record / mute per track from the keyboard. High value for live looper use; not landed yet (MIDI footswitches are usually the better surface for this). On the post-launch roadmap.

If you want a binding that isn't here, ask: hi@axion.cab.