One box that finds everything.

The switcher is kolu’s unified search surface. Press Cmd/Ctrl + K and type — a branch, a repo, a host, a command — without first deciding which drawer to open. Terminals, hosts, and commands share one index and one muscle memory; the extra chords are deep links into scoped views of the same surface, not separate apps.

What opens at the root

At the empty root you see:

1. Recent — the three warmest terminals, interleaved across every connected host — except the tile that is already active. Warmth is max(your last visit, server activity), so a terminal a background agent is working in can lead the band even if you have not opened it. One seat is always reserved for the terminal you were last in, so no amount of background chatter can push it out of the list; the highlight then lands on it, which is what makes ⌘K → Enter a toggle. Cross-host rows show the same host chip as search hits. Because the active tile is omitted and the highlight starts on the first Recent row, ⌘K then Enter toggles between your last two terminals (including across hosts) — the same default-highlight rule every scope follows.
2. Hosts — every machine in the pool (when more than local is configured), quiet when healthy; active only for the canvas host.
3. Terminals section — the Terminals group (⌘⇧K) and New terminal.
4. Further command sections — Active Terminal, Canvas, UI, Help — as usual, not collapsed into a single “Commands” band until you type.

Type to search across every kind at once. Matching is multi-token: every whitespace-separated word must appear somewhere in the row’s corpus (repo, branch, intent, agent, cwd, host label, command name…). Token order does not matter — kolu auth finds the same row as auth kolu.

Terminals across every connected host

The switcher indexes live tiles on every connected host in the padi pool — not only the machine whose canvas you are viewing. Splits are omitted at any depth: activating the parent tile brings them with it. The active host’s Dock is the pane-level navigator: it shows those splits as indented entries and can land in one directly. “Tile” here means exactly what the canvas means by it, so a split whose parent is gone — which the canvas paints as a tile of its own — is listed rather than lost between the two views.

• Plain shells appear (no agent required), with the same state pip language as the Dock (shell mark / idle paint).
• Repo identity matches the Dock: each terminal row leads with a solid monogram tile, the repo name in repo colour, the branch in the same branch hue the dock uses, and a thin repo-coloured spine — one paint vocabulary, not a second colour scheme.
• Order is fleet-wide max(visit, activity) (visit = last time you made the tile active; activity is the Dock’s reprojected clock). Parked rows the activity window would hide are dropped here too.
• Cross-host rows carry one host chip in the right rail — the same identity hue + connection-status language as the chrome-bar host strip — so srid@builder vs local is obvious without repeating the name in the context line. Selecting one switches the canvas to that host and activates the terminal in one step.

Browse Terminals: flat list, host-grouped headers

⌘⇧K → Terminals shows every connected host’s terminals immediately — no host drill required. The list is visually grouped under host headers (local · 3 terminals, zest · 6 terminals) with a soft host-hue wash and monogram so machines stay scannable; active host’s group is first; within a group, recency order. Hosts with zero terminals still get a header so the fleet map is complete.

Host-scoping is optional. Click a host header (or use the dock search icon) to narrow to that host; the breadcrumb becomes Commands › Terminals › zest. Backspace on an empty query pops a level.

Typing filters the whole list flat across every host (host chips still mark foreign rows). At the root, the same multi-token match finds terminals without entering Terminals first.

The active host’s Dock remains the always-on navigator for the machine you are looking at; the switcher is the jump path over the whole fleet.

How results rank

With a non-empty query, hits are ordered by kind first, not by how close the string match is:

Priority	Kind	Tie-break
1	Terminals	Warmth — max(last client visit, server/Dock activity)
2	Hosts	Pool order
3	Commands	Existing section order

So a branch name outranks a host that happens to share a substring, and both outrank a command. There are no prefix sigils (> commands, @ hosts) — scoping is the existing drill-in path (below), not a mode character.

Where the highlight lands

The three switcher scopes — ⌘K, ⌘⇧K, ⌘⇧H — open with the highlight on the row you were last on that isn’t the one you are on now. One rule, so all three share a muscle memory: press the chord, press Enter, you are back where you just were. Press it again and you are back — a two-key toggle for terminals and for machines alike.

“Last on” means your own trail and nothing else: which tile you activated, which machine you switched to. A background agent printing output does not count as you having been there, so a chatty terminal can never take the highlight off the one you came from — the toggle works the same whether the workspace is idle or busy.

That is deliberately a different number from the one the list is ordered by. Empty-root Recent ranks by max(your last visit, that terminal's own activity), because “what is warm” is the right question for deciding what to show you first — and output is a fair answer to it. So the two can disagree, and when they do, the order shows you what is happening while the highlight keeps pointing home.

Which is why a highlighted row part-way down a list is not a bug — the rows above it are simply warmer, or ones you visited longer ago. The Hosts list makes that plainest: it keeps pool order and never re-sorts, so the highlight is the only thing that moves. In Terminals browse the host headers are likewise fixed, while the rows inside each host are warmest-first.

Selecting the row you are already on would be a no-op, so no switcher offers it as the default. Plain command lists carry neither recency nor a “current” row, so they still open on their first entry — the rule only has something to say where the list is a switcher. And the moment you type, recency stops mattering: the highlight moves to the top match.

The rule applies to whichever kind leads the list, which at root is normally Recent. So when no terminal but your own is open, Recent is empty and ⌘K leads with machines instead — the highlight falls through to the machine you came from, and Enter hops hosts rather than tiles.

Deep-link chords

Chord / control	Opens
Mod + K	Root — search everything
Mod + Shift + K	Terminals — all hosts’ terminals under host headers
Dock search icon	Terminals › active host — only that machine’s terminals
Mod + Shift + H	Hosts — same host rows as root (switch canvas host)

Mod is Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Linux and Windows. The full chord table lives under Keyboard shortcuts.

Scoped views

Deep links do not leave the switcher — they drill in. Breadcrumbs show the path; Backspace on an empty query (or the breadcrumb) pops one level back to root. Escape closes the whole surface.

Terminals (⌘⇧K / dock search)

⌘⇧K lands on Terminals with every connected host already expanded under headers — type to filter, or click a header to scope. The dock search icon opens Terminals › the host you are viewing (host-scoped). Selecting a row switches host if needed and activates the terminal.

Hosts (⌘⇧H)

⌘⇧H opens the Hosts scope — the same host rows as the root index (one source of truth; there is no separate “Switch host” list). Selecting a host re-keys the canvas with no reload — same as the host strip.

The rows stay in pool order (a machine list that reshuffles under the cursor is not one you can learn), and the highlight opens on the host you switched away from, so ⌘⇧H then Enter hops between the last two machines the same way ⌘K hops between the last two terminals. Until a tab has switched at least once there is no such machine, so the highlight falls back to the first other row. The trail is per browser tab — two tabs parked on two machines each keep their own way back — and it survives a reload of that tab, not a new one.

Host status text is quiet by default:

Condition	Context text
Canvas’s current host	active
Connected, not active	(none — connected is the default)
Warming / failed / removed	connecting / unreachable / removed

The connection dot still carries health color on every row — and it is the whole-chain reading, so a reachable host whose terminal daemon is down paints amber here too, never green. (The status text above stays about the connection alone; the dot is where the chain is read.)

Reading a row

Every result kind paints the same four slots so a mixed list stays scannable:

1. Lead — agent-state pip (terminal; plain shells get the shell mark), connection dot (host), or glyph (command).
2. Identity — for terminals, the same headline as the Dock: repo colour eyebrow + intent first line when one is set, otherwise the branch. Host rows show user@host; commands show the command name. Matched tokens bold in place.
3. Context — one truncating line. When the identity is the intent, the branch sits here; otherwise agent summary / foreground (Dock subline). Host status or command description for other kinds. Never carries the host name on a terminal row.
4. Right rail — host chip (only when the terminal is on a non-active host — hue ring + label), recency, keybind, drill chevron, and a kind tag (term / host / cmd) only at the mixed root.

What this is not

• The dock is still the always-visible navigator down the left edge — glanceable without opening anything. The switcher is the jump / search path over the same terminal set.
• The host strip is still ambient multi-host status; ⌘K does not replace it.
• Sleep, restore, and session memory live under Sessions; the switcher only finds terminals that already exist on connected hosts.

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