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Games commonly bind Alt+<key> themselves, and whkd's low-level keyboard hook wins by default, so the game never receives the keystroke. whkd has a `.pause` directive for exactly this: it toggles every other hotkey off and on again. Bound to Ctrl+Alt+P rather than a plain Alt combo so it stays reachable while a game is holding Alt. This also corrects a binding that claimed to do this and didn't. Alt+P is `komorebic toggle-pause`, which pauses komorebi's tiling but leaves whkd intercepting the keyboard, so the game still saw nothing. It was labelled the "gaming escape hatch". Both bindings are kept, since they do different and complementary things, but the comments now say which is which. The README documents whkd's per-application alternative for anyone who wants this automatic instead of modal: a binding can take a `Default` command plus `Ignore` for a named process, and whkd decides on the focused window, so the game takes precedence while focused and the WM bindings resume on alt-tab. That is per binding rather than per app, so covering a game means repeating it for every hotkey - noted as the tradeoff rather than adopted wholesale.
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Why
Games bind
Alt+<key>themselves, and whkd's keyboard hook wins by default — so the game never receives the keystroke.Worse, the binding that claimed to solve this didn't.
Alt+Prunskomorebic toggle-pause, which pauses komorebi's tiling but leaves whkd intercepting the keyboard. It was labelled the "gaming escape hatch" while doing nothing of the sort.What changed
Ctrl+Alt+Pnow toggles every hotkey off and on, via whkd's own.pausedirective. Ctrl+Alt rather than plain Alt so it stays reachable while a game is holding Alt combos.Both bindings are kept — they're complementary, and the comments now say which does what:
Alt+PCtrl+Alt+PThe automatic alternative, documented not adopted
whkd can also decide per focused application, which is closer to an ideal "game wins while focused, WM resumes on alt-tab" with no mode to remember:
The catch is that it's per binding, not per app — covering a game properly means repeating that block across all 49 bindings. So
.pauseis the default answer and the README documents this as the option for a game worth the effort.Verification
whkd restarted against the new config and stayed running (it exits on parse errors), confirming
.pauseis accepted on the installed whkd 0.2.10.