Every Way In Six ways to open the box, what each one lands you in, and the keys once you are there.

The box is the same box however you reach it. What differs is which lane you land in and whether it arrives with anything already in it.

The six ways

How	Lands in	Carries
⌘K	Search	Nothing
Click the search bar	Search	Nothing
Type in the search bar	Search	What you typed
⌘; or ⌘.	Create	Nothing
Hold ⌘K	Search, listening	What you say
Voice control in the search bar	A spoken conversation	Nothing

On Windows and Linux, read Ctrl wherever ⌘ appears. The platform detects which you are on and the labels change accordingly.

⌘K toggles

Pressing it again closes the box. Worth knowing because the instinct after opening it by accident is to reach for Escape, and the same chord works.

Typing in the top bar

The search bar across the top of the screen is not a separate search. Clicking it opens the box, and typing into it passes your text straight through, so the first characters you type are not lost.

That is the smoothest entry for most people: you were reaching for the bar anyway, and by the time the panel appears your query is already in it.

⌘; goes straight to creating

Two chords, ⌘; and ⌘., both open the box in the capture lane rather than in search.

Use them when you already know you are writing something down rather than looking for something. It saves the step of typing an at-sign to switch lanes, and more importantly it means capture has a dedicated key you can hit without thinking.

The keys once you are in

Key	Does
Arrow up / down	Move through results
Enter	Open what is selected
Escape	Step back a lane, then close

The arrows include the two offer rows at the bottom, so Ask and Create are reachable without touching the mouse.

Escape is two-stage. From the Ask or Create lane, the first press returns you to the search results with your query intact. The second closes the box. That is designed for the common mistake of engaging a lane you did not mean to.

Where it does not fire

Shortcuts stand down while you are typing into a field, so ⌘; in a message composer inserts a semicolon rather than opening a box over what you were writing.

This is worth knowing in reverse: if a shortcut appears not to work, check whether your cursor is in a text field.

The rest of the keyboard

The platform has a wider set of shortcuts beyond this box, including a chord for jumping to each HQ, toggling the sidebar and switching light and dark mode.

They are listed in the Shortcuts and Commands section, and they are shown on both Mac and Windows forms.

What survives a lane change

Your text follows you, which is what makes the box forgiving.

Search to Create. Typing an at-sign mid-sentence switches lanes and carries everything you have already written, so a search that turns into a capture does not start again.

Search to Ask. Taking the Ask row hands over your query as the question.

Back again. Escape from either lane returns you to the search results with your text intact.

The practical upshot is that guessing wrong costs a keystroke. You never have to decide what you are doing before you start typing, which is the whole point of one box rather than three.

Mac and Windows

The platform detects which you are on and shows the right keys: ⌘ and ⇧ on a Mac, Ctrl and Shift elsewhere.

That means the labels in the interface and in the shortcuts list are the ones your keyboard actually has, and there is nothing to translate in your head.

What to actually memorise

Two things, and the rest can wait.

⌘K to find. This replaces most navigation, and it is the one that changes how the platform feels within a day.

⌘; to capture. This is the one that stops things being forgotten, and it is the one nobody discovers on their own.

Everything else here is a refinement on those two. The hold-to-talk variants, the type-through from the top bar and the two-stage Escape are all worth knowing eventually and none of them are worth learning first.

Why there are so many doors

It looks like redundancy and it is not. Each entry point exists for a different moment.

⌘K is for when your hands are already on the keyboard, which is most of the time.

The search bar is for when your hand is on the mouse, and for people who have not learned the chord yet. It also carries the hint that tells them the chord exists.

⌘; is for capture, which needs its own key because stopping to think about which lane you want is exactly the friction that stops people writing things down.

The hold variants are for when typing is inconvenient rather than impossible.

The voice control is for a conversation rather than a query.

The test each one passes: it removes a step from a moment that actually happens.

Discoverability, and why it matters

Almost everything in this section is invisible until somebody tells you.

⌘K is announced by the hint in the search bar. Nothing announces ⌘;, nothing announces that holding either chord listens, and nothing announces that typing an at-sign switches lanes.

That is a reasonable trade for a clean interface and it has a cost: most people use perhaps a third of what the box does, indefinitely.

If you are rolling this out to a team, the two things worth saying out loud in the first week are that ⌘; captures, and that typing a question offers to ask. Everything else people find on their own once they know the box does more than search.

One thing worth trying

Open the box, type the first four letters of something you were about to go and find through the menu, and press Enter.

Most people do that once and stop using the menu for records entirely, and that single change is worth more than everything else in this section combined.