Trigger Sequences

Ghostty supports keybindings that require a sequence of triggers to activate the action. For example, you could require ctrl+a followed by n to open a new window. In other software, this is sometimes referred to as a "leader key", a "key chord", a "key table", etc.

To specify a sequence of triggers, use the normal trigger syntax and separate the triggers in the sequence with a > character. An example is shown below:

keybind = ctrl+a>n=new_window

Warning

If you define a sequence as a CLI argument to ghostty, you probably have to quote the keybind since > is a special character in most shells. Example: ghostty --keybind='ctrl+a>n=new_window'

A trigger sequence has some special handling:

• Ghostty will wait an indefinite amount of time for the next key in the sequence. There is no way to specify a timeout. The only way to force the output of a prefix key is to assign another keybind to specifically output that key (i.e. ctrl+a>ctrl+a=text:foo) or press an unbound key which will send both keys to the program.

• If a prefix in a sequence is previously bound, the sequence will override the previous binding. For example, if ctrl+a is bound to new_window and ctrl+a>n is bound to new_tab, pressing ctrl+a will do nothing.

• Adding to the above, if a previously bound sequence prefix is used in a new, non-sequence binding, the entire previously bound sequence will be unbound. For example, if you bind ctrl+a>n and ctrl+a>t, and then bind ctrl+a directly, both ctrl+a>n and ctrl+a>t will become unbound.

• Trigger sequences are not allowed for global: or all:-prefixed triggers. This is a limitation we could remove in the future.