Customizing Shortcuts

How to rebind the 12 customizable shortcuts in the Celestial Vault. Plus a geeky note on Mac Alt+Shift physical-key handling.

The Celestial Vault ships with 12 rebindable shortcuts that drive its main flows — opening a daily note, summarizing a month, jumping to a Dreamline, and so on. The defaults are good. But every single one is rebindable to whatever you'd prefer.

How To Open The Shortcut Settings

Settings → Celestial Vault → Shortcut bindings (scroll to the bottom of the Celestial tab).

You'll see a list of 12 capturable rows.

Each Row's Anatomy

A typical row:

Open daily note          ⌥⇧D    [↻]

Action label (e.g., "Open daily note")
Current binding (e.g., ⌥⇧D on Mac, Alt+Shift+D on Windows)
Revert icon — restores this one row's default

Capturing A New Binding

Click the binding chip (the ⌥⇧D part)
The label changes to "Press a key…"
Press your new combo (any modifier — Cmd, Ctrl, Alt, Shift — plus a key)
The binding saves immediately

To cancel mid-capture: hit Escape.

What's Rebindable

The 12 rows cover the most common Celestial actions:

Action	Default (Mac)	Default (Win/Linux)
Open daily note	`⌥⇧D`	`Alt+Shift+D`
Open monthly note	`⌥⇧M`	`Alt+Shift+M`
Open Dreamline	`⌥⇧Q`	`Alt+Shift+Q`
Open yearly note	`⌥⇧Y`	`Alt+Shift+Y`
Create new unique note	`⌥⇧N`	`Alt+Shift+N`
Insert template	`⌥⇧T`	`Alt+Shift+T`
AI alias (current note)	`⌥⇧A`	`Alt+Shift+A`
AI summarize (current note)	`⌥⇧S`	`Alt+Shift+S`
AI Wheel of Life (monthly)	`⌥⇧W`	`Alt+Shift+W`
AI ask (yearly Q&A)	`⌥⇧K`	`Alt+Shift+K`
Navigate previous (Dreamline)	`⌥⇧←`	`Alt+Shift+←`
Navigate next (Dreamline)	`⌥⇧→`	`Alt+Shift+→`

(Exact list may vary slightly between Celestial versions — your settings tab is the source of truth.)

Why Mac Alt+Shift Works Here But Breaks In Other Plugins

A geeky-but-cool detail.

On macOS, Option + Shift + A is supposed to type a special character (Å). Most plugins use Obsidian's command-hotkey system, which sees the transformed character — and ends up either failing silently or binding the special character itself.

Celestial's shortcut bar listens to the raw keydown event and reads ev.code (the physical key on your keyboard) instead of ev.key (the transformed character). So ⌥⇧A reliably means "the A key, with Option and Shift held" — regardless of OS input method, keyboard layout, or transform rules.

This is invisible polish. You only notice it if you've used other Mac plugins and watched them break in weird ways.

Reverting Bindings

Two buttons:

Per-row revert — the small ↻ icon on each row, restores just that one binding to its default
Reset all — at the bottom of the section, restores every binding to defaults

Both are non-destructive (you can re-bind anytime after) and immediate.

Empty Object = Use Defaults

Internally, the shortcutHotkeys: {} setting starts as an empty object. As you customize bindings, the relevant action IDs get added with their new key codes. If you'd ever want to reset every customization at once, the cleanest way is:

Reset all in the settings tab (preferred)

Or, manually:

Quit Obsidian
Edit .obsidian/plugins/celestial-plugin/data.json
Set "shortcutHotkeys": {}
Relaunch

Conflicts With Obsidian Or Other Plugins

Celestial intercepts at a low level.

The Celestial shortcut system grabs keydown events early. If you bind ⌥⇧D in Celestial, that combo will not also fire any Obsidian command or other-plugin shortcut you might've set elsewhere.

Generally fine — but if a key combo seems "stuck doing the Celestial thing" when you wanted it to do something else, the fix is to rebind the Celestial action away from that combo.

Adding More Shortcuts

The 12 rows are what's exposed in the settings tab. If you want shortcuts for other commands (Obsidian's built-in commands, other plugins, custom Templater scripts), use Obsidian's standard Settings → Hotkeys tab.

Those bindings live alongside Celestial's — no conflict, since they go through different code paths.

A Suggested Customization

If you find Mac's ⌥ modifier hard to reach, a popular swap is to use ⌘⇧ (Cmd+Shift) instead:

Action	Customized to
Open daily note	`⌘⇧D`
Open monthly note	`⌘⇧M`
Open Dreamline	`⌘⇧Q`
...etc	...

⌘⇧ is built for ergonomic two-handed access on Mac keyboards. Try it for a week and see.

Up Next

The Shortcut Bar — the visual hint bar these shortcuts drive
Atmosphere & Polish Toggles — disabling the shortcut bar while keeping bindings
The Settings Tab — the full settings overview

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