Okay, I have to get this off my chest. I've been using Continue for a few months now, absolutely love its core functionality—the inline edits and the chat are game-changers for my workflow—but every single time I install it on a new machine, my first hour is spent wrestling with the keybindings. The defaults feel... aggressively unintuitive to me.
Maybe it's because I'm coming from a heavy VS Code/Vim keymap background, but having the main `Ctrl (or Cmd) + Shift + L` for opening the chat just doesn't live in my muscle memory. I find myself constantly triggering the wrong thing, or my fingers go to a more natural spot and nothing happens. It feels like they prioritized uniqueness over ergonomics.
For example, here’s what I mean about clash and flow:
- `Ctrl+Shift+L`: In so many other tools (browsers, IDEs), this is already bound to things like "reload" or "format document." It's a crowded shortcut.
- The inline edit shortcuts (`Ctrl+Shift+I` etc.) feel like they're on the wrong hand for how I work, forcing me to take my hand off the mouse/navigation keys completely.
- There's no easy "quick fix" or suggestion keybinding that mirrors VS Code's `Alt+.` or similar, which is how my brain is wired to initiate an AI assist.
I ended up doing a full remap, and it made a world of difference. My config now looks something like this in my `~/.continue/config.json`:
```json
{
"customKeybindings": [
{
"key": "alt+space",
"command": "toggleContinue"
},
{
"key": "alt+i",
"command": "toggleInlineEdit"
},
{
"key": "alt+q",
"command": "quickFix"
}
]
}
```
Instantly more intuitive for *me*. But it got me wondering—am I alone in this? Did the team have a specific design philosophy behind the defaults that I'm just not seeing? Perhaps it's to avoid clashes with specific editors' native shortcuts?
I'd love to hear from others. What's your experience with the default keybindings? Did you keep them, struggle through, or immediately remap like I did? And if you remapped, what did you change them to? Maybe we can crowdsource a more "community-standard" alternative setup.
Oh totally feel you on the muscle memory clash. I'm in VS Code all day for our automation scripts, and my fingers just keep trying `Ctrl+L` to focus the chat, which does... nothing, or selects a line. The switch is jarring.
I wonder if the uniqueness is partly about avoiding conflicts inside other editors themselves, but you're right, it just ends up conflicting with every other tool's mental model instead. I've found mapping the main chat to `Ctrl+;` works way better for me, it feels like a 'talk' key and is free most places.
That's an interesting remap - `Ctrl+;` is clever because the semicolon isn't heavily contested in most code editors for global shortcuts. I've seen similar 'dialogue' bindings use `Ctrl+'` or `Ctrl+/`. The real friction, I think, comes when a tool like Continue tries to establish a universal keymap across multiple host editors (VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim) without a coherent philosophy.
You mention avoiding conflicts inside the editors themselves, but in my experience, that's where the best defaults live. For instance, JetBrains IDEs have a well-established pattern where `Ctrl+Shift+A` opens the "Find Action" dialogue - a command palette. Extensions that adopt that same mental model (like using `Ctrl+Shift+A` for a command-driven chat) feel native immediately, even if the specific keys differ from VS Code's `Ctrl+Shift+P`. Continue's choice feels like it's trying to be unique across all platforms, which ironically makes it alien on each one.
I ended up mapping the chat to `Ctrl+Shift+C` (for "Continue") on my setup. It's a mnemonic that overrides the default "copy" in some terminals, but that's a tradeoff I can manage locally.
Data over dogma