Keybindings

Emanix runs EWM — Emacs is the Wayland compositor. There is no separate window manager or status bar: windowing, workspaces, and the top bar all live in Emacs. Super (a.k.a. s-, the Windows key) is the compositor modifier; C-c / C-x are Emacs prefixes. Text editing is modal (Meow).

Two routing rules worth knowing:

  • Super (s-) keys are intercepted by the compositor — they work from any window, including a focused terminal or browser.
  • C-c / C-x are ordinary Emacs bindings — they only register when a native Emacs buffer has focus, not from a Wayland surface (terminal). That is why the global assistant is on s-i, not a C-c prefix.

There is no non-EWM desktop path. Emanix does not ship a standalone window manager, notification daemon or launcher, because EWM is all three.

1. EWM (compositor — Super keys)

1.1. Frame slots (workspaces)

Binding Action
s-1 … s-9 Go to / create slot 1–9 on the current output strip (keyed by number — s-3 never conjures 1 and 2)
s-0 Go to / create slot 10
s-r Rename the current slot (shows in the top bar)
s-q Close the current slot (mirrors Hyprland's killactive)
s-t New frame after the current one

Slots are generic — no app is tied to a number. Names are session-local; set them with s-r.

1.2. Focus & movement

Binding Action
s-←/→/↑/↓ Move focus between frames
s-Shift-←/→ Move the current frame within the output strip
s-Ctrl-←/→ Move the current frame to another output
s-Ctrl-↑/↓ Move the buffer up / down (buf-move)
s-Tab / s-Shift-Tab Cycle surface buffers (next / previous)
s-f Toggle fullscreen for the focused surface

1.3. Launchers & assistant

Binding Action
s-d App launcher (ewm-launch-app)
s-w Firefox
s-i Search arc — the local retrieval-only config index; works from any slot

1.4. Session & clipboard

Binding Action
s-l Lock session (swaylock)
s-c / s-v Copy / paste (kill-ring-save / yank)
C-c R Restart EWM — asks for confirmation, saves file buffers, then exits the session

C-c R is the one session binding that is NOT a Super key: it is deliberately a C-c chord so a stray Super press cannot end the session, and it only needs to fire while Emacs has focus. No reboot is needed to restart the compositor — ewm.nix launches EWM from the tty1 login shell, which waits on the Emacs daemon and ends the session when it exits. Then getty's autologin (opt-in per host) logs back in; without it you get a login prompt, and EWM restarts on your next tty1 login. Killing the daemon is the restart.

It asks one yes-or-no-p question first, then avoids save-buffers-kill-emacs, which prompts once per modified buffer and again per buffer with a live process — a long interactive walk on a daemon that has been up for days. Instead it saves file buffers unattended and calls kill-emacs. The trade-off: live processes (ghostel shells, running agents) are terminated without a prompt, so anything unsaved that is not a file buffer is lost. If the daemon never starts (30s poll) or dies within 15s, the login hook writes ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/run/user/$(id -u)}/ewm-flap and the next login drops to a plain shell; remove it and log out to re-arm.

The top bar — clock, battery, volume/wifi/cpu/ram/gpu, and the slot list — is rendered in the Emacs tab-bar (emanix-modeline.el, emanix-ewm-slots.el), not a separate bar. Compositor bindings live in EWM's ewm-mode-map; the Emanix additions are in the with-eval-after-load 'ewm block of config.el.

2. Config layout: a loader, a config, and a fallback

~/.config/emacs/ holds four top-level files (early-init.el, init.el, config.el and fallback.el) plus lisp/. The split is a safety boundary, not organisation:

File Role
init.el 93-line loader. Loads config.el inside a condition-case. Must never break, so it is rarely edited.
config.el All actual configuration. Free to be edited and to break.
fallback.el Minimum viable desktop, loaded only when config.el fails.

Why the loader is a separate file. A signal raised inside a load=ed file propagates to its caller, so =init.el catches two failures that no guard inside the config could:

  • a read-time failure such as an unbalanced paren — nothing in config.el runs, so nothing in it can catch anything;
  • a load-time failure such as a require that signals.

Both happened on 2026-08-10 and both presented identically — no top bar, s-d dead, no window navigation — because Emacs is the compositor here. EWM itself survived both, since it starts from --eval on the command line, which Emacs processes after init.

How to tell you are in the fallback. The tab bar shows a red ⚠ CONFIG FAILED item at the far left. For the reason: 

emacsclient -e 'emanix/init-error'

nil is a healthy boot. Anything else is the error that aborted config.el.

What the fallback restores: the top bar (emanix/modeline-mode), the launcher (C-c o), the emanix/ewm-* slot commands and a theme. Not completion, meow, magit, org or apheleia — recoverable by fixing config.el, and not the desktop.

Editing caution. config.el is an out-of-store symlink into the checkout (liveElisp), so an edit is live on the next Emacs start with no rebuild. That is why the guard is a runtime one: both 2026-08-10 incidents were uncommitted live edits, which no build-time or pre-commit check would have caught.

Testing it: ./tests/init-guard.sh reproduces both faults against a temp copy and asserts the desktop survives each, plus that a healthy config is unaffected.

3. A note on what the distribution supplies

Two bindings on this page cross the line between the distribution and the flake that consumes it, and the split is deliberate rather than an oversight.

C-c p opens the Pi agent as an Emacs buffer, over ACP. The binding and the glue (emanix-agent-shell.el) are Emanix, as are the adapter wrappers in agent-acp/; the pi binary is not. An AI harness is not a decision a distribution should make for you, so Emanix wires the key and leaves the choice of agent — or of no agent at all — to your own flake. With no adapter installed the binding reports the missing adapter rather than failing silently.

C-c C-' does the same for Claude, and s-S-<return> reaches it from any slot.

Theme switching works the other way round. emanix/theme-set lives here and does the work; the dot-theme-set command that calls it is a consumer script. The distribution owns the mechanism, the consumer owns the entry point. See Theming.

4. Emacs — modal editing (Meow)

Editing is select-then-act (Kakoune-style): build a selection, then one key acts on it. Enter insert with i / a; ESC returns to normal.

Key Action
h j k l Move (also starts a selection); H J K L extend it
w / x Mark word / select line (press again, or a digit, to extend)
d / s / c Delete / cut / change the selection
y / p Copy / paste
u Undo (U = undo within selection)
f / t Find / till char forward; F = avy 2-char jump anywhere (the distribution's default; a consumer can rebind it)
, . [ ] Inner / bounds / beginning / end of the thing at point
Q / X Go to line
SPC Leader (SPC ? = full meow cheatsheet)

Config: meow-normal-define-key in config.el. C-c d is Dirvish, not a line delete — to delete lines use x (select, repeat to extend) then d.

5. Emacs — commands (C-c / C-x)

Work when a native Emacs buffer is focused.

Binding Action
C-c i i Search arc across the whole corpus. s-i does the same from any slot.
C-c i n Search arc in the org-roam vault (ARC's vault scope)
C-c i o Search arc in the NixOS and Home Manager options (ARC's options scope)
C-c i R Reindex every collection (async; progress via message)
C-c i c Cancel a running reindex
C-c z Toggle prose rendering in an org buffer (rendered vs. raw source)
M-g i Jump to a heading in this buffer (consult-imenu)
C-c d Dirvish (file manager)
C-c f consult-ripgrep (search project)
C-s consult-line (search buffer)
C-x b consult-buffer (switch buffer)
M-y consult-yank-pop
C-. embark-act
C-x g magit-status
C-c n f / n i / n c org-roam find / insert / capture
C-c a org-agenda
C-c p Pi: open a Pi agent shell (ACP) — needs a pi-acp adapter and pi on PATH
C-c C-' Claude: open a Claude agent shell (ACP); C-u prompts for a directory
C-c r Send the region to the agent shell
C-c C-c Confirm / finish (Org, Pi, etc.)

Fuller personal reference is in the vault notes Emacs Shortcuts, Emacs Command Map, and Meow (~/docs/org, the default org-roam root).

5.1. Prose rendering for org and markdown

.org files open in emanix-prose-mode: IBM Plex Sans body text, serif headings, hidden markup that reappears on the line at point, a centered 90-column reading width, and monospace code blocks and tables. .md files open in markdown-modern-mode, a separate tree-sitter-based major mode that renders markdown inline.

  • C-c z — toggle back to plain monospace source (org)
  • C-c + / C-c - / C-c 0 — enlarge, shrink, reset the document's text size (Emacs's text scaling, per buffer, so another document keeps its own size)
  • M-g i — jump to a heading (consult-imenu)
  • TAB / S-TAB — fold a section / the whole outline (org's own in org buffers; markdown-modern's in .md buffers)

Code blocks and tables stay monospace — tables align by character count, so a proportional font would break them. The code-block background is read from the active theme's surface0, so it follows a theme switch with no extra config.

Implementation is emacs/lisp/emanix-prose.el.

6. Emacs — windows, terminal and other keys

Bound in config.el and available whenever a native Emacs buffer has focus.

Binding Action
C-c ? The welcome buffer (orientation, shown once per machine); M-x emanix-guides lists every guide
C-c w Window-layout map: u / r undo / redo the layout, s / v split below / right, d delete window, o delete the others, = balance, m swap windows (ace), w / j save layout to / jump to a register; C-c w C-h lists them
M-h / M-j / M-k / M-l Focus the window left / down / up / right (windmove); the shifted M-H … M-L swap windows instead. A ghostel buffer keeps these keys for its program
S-←/→/↑/↓ Resize the window
C-x o ace-window — jump to a window by letter when there are three or more
C-c t ghostel terminal buffer; C-u C-c t opens a new one
C-c o App launcher (the same as s-d under EWM)
C-c K Kill every buffer in a named group (emanix/kill-buffer-group; prompts for the group)
C-c c Run the consumer's calendar-sync tool from $EMANIX_BIN_DIR
C-c b consult-bookmark

Three more Super bindings come with the compositor. s-<return> opens a Ghostty terminal in the current slot. s-m slides every frame off screen and back, and s-e opens the focused text field in an Emacs buffer (C-c C-c sends it back, C-c C-k cancels). The last two are upstream EWM's.

7. Emacs — code navigation and LSP

Added 2026-08-07. Emacs 31 ships nearly all of this: project.el, xref, eglot and flymake are built in. Only nix-ts-mode, apheleia and the tree-sitter grammars come from Nix (emacs/packages.nix).

Navigation — stock bindings, no config needed:

Binding Action
C-x p f Find file in project
C-x p p / C-x p b Switch project / project buffers
M-. / M-, Jump to definition / jump back
M-? Find references

With eglot attached, M-. is a semantic jump rather than a guess.

Diagnostics and refactoring — C-c e (flymake ships no bindings of its own):

Binding Action
C-c e n / C-c e p Next / previous diagnostic
C-c e l List all diagnostics (consult-flymake)
C-c e r eglot-rename — rename across the project
C-c e a eglot-code-actions
C-c e = Format buffer now

Automatic behaviour: eglot attaches on .nix and .py when a server is installed. Emanix installs and names none; register yours via eglot-server-programs in personal.el. apheleia formats on save — nixpkgs-fmt for Nix, ruff for Python. nixpkgs-fmt is this repo's own nix fmt formatter, so a save from Emacs and nix fmt produce identical bytes.

Check the mode line for EGLOT to confirm the server attached; M-x eglot-events-buffer shows the handshake if it did not.

7.1. Formatting

C-c e = formats the current buffer; saving does it automatically. Nix and Python always format. HTML, CSS and Jinja2 templates format only in repos that declare their own formatter config — otherwise the first save of an unformatted file would rewrite the whole thing, and a mature template tree can run to hundreds of files.

To opt a repo in:

  • Jinja2 templates — add a [tool.djlint] section to pyproject.toml, or a .djlintrc. Then reformat the tree once, in its own commit (djlint . --reformat --profile jinja), so later saves make small diffs.
  • HTML and CSS — add a .prettierrc (or any config filename prettier recognises). A prettier devDependency in package.json does not count; a top-level prettier key does.

The opt-in is looked for from the file upward, so config at the top of a repo covers all of it. The search stops at the repo root (the directory holding .git, which is itself checked) and, for a file with no enclosing repo, one level below your home directory — ~ and everything above it are never looked at, so a stray ~/.prettierrc cannot opt in the whole machine.

Templates are recognised by living under a templates/ directory — that is also what selects web-mode over the plain html-ts-mode. A template language other than Jinja2 sets emanix-web-djlint-profile in .dir-locals.el.

One side effect worth knowing: every .html that is not under a templates/ directory now opens in html-ts-mode rather than the old mhtml-mode. Tree-sitter highlighting and indentation, a different keymap, and no mhtml sub-modes for embedded <script>=/=<style> blocks — those are plain HTML text now rather than live JS and CSS modes.

8. Theme

Theming is driven from Emacs. C-c v flips dark and light (emanix/theme-toggle); emanix/theme-set applies a named theme and is the authority for a switch. The dot-theme-set and dot-theme-toggle commands are consumer scripts that reach the same mechanism. See Theming.

9. Ghostty

Ghostty is configured from home/ghostty.nix (written to ~/.config/ghostty/config). It clears the stock keybinds (keybind = clear) and adds Emacs-style clipboard bindings — super+c / super+v and alt+w / ctrl+y. Everything else is built-in; see Ghostty docs for the stock set.

10. Neovim (retired)

Neovim/kickstart is gone — Emacs is the sole editor (see Philosophy). base/nvim was deleted along with the rest of base/.

11. AI tooling

pi from the shell; skills under ~/.pi/agent/skills/. In Emacs, arc (the local, offline retrieval index) is s-i (search from anywhere) or C-c i (its command map). C-c i n and C-c i o scope the same search to the org-roam vault and to the NixOS and Home Manager options. Results land in the *arc-search* buffer: RET visits the hit, TAB expands the matching passages, g re-runs the query, s changes the scope, and n / p move. There is no answer buffer and no capture key.

arc retrieves only what it indexed. When nothing in the scope matches it says so and names the scope it searched; it never writes prose at all, so an invented NixOS option is not possible.