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The phone key row

A phone keyboard is twenty-six letters and a `123` button. Everything else — a full stop, a comma, a bracket, a dollar sign — costs a trip to another layout and a trip back. Some characters aren't on it anywhere: there is no backtick on an iOS keyboard at all.

So Circuitry puts a key row above the keyboard, and it pages sideways. Swipe it left or right to change what it holds. The characters live in fixed places that don't move under your thumb, and using one never changes the layout you're typing on.

The pages

Swipe from the first towards the last:

PageWhat's on it
Keys`esc` `tab`, the modifiers, and the arrow keys
Punctuation`.` `,` `?` `!` `'` `"` `:` `;` `(` `)` `-` — what ordinary sentences are made of
Code symbolsbacktick, `~` `
Operators`<` `>` `=` `+` `*` `&` `^` `%` `#` `@` `$`
Numbers`1234567890-=` — the number row, as a real keyboard has it
Shift + numbers`!@#$%^&*()_+` — the same row shifted
Navigation`home` `end` `pgup` `pgdn` `del` `ins`
Function keys`F1` to `F12`
MacrosYour own phrases, one tap each — swipe the other way to reach it

The order is how deeply the phone hides each group. Punctuation comes first because it's what most typing needs; the code symbols come next because they're a layer deeper still — behind `123` and then `#+=` — and the backtick isn't reachable at all. The digits sit behind those because a digit is only one layer down: the row saves you the layout change, not the tap.

Some characters appear on more than one page. That's deliberate. A `-` is a hyphen mid-sentence and a minus in an expression, and the two are reached by different intentions — having to remember which group owns a character would cost more than carrying it twice.

Macros

The pages wrap, so swiping the other way from the first page lands straight on Macros — one swipe, and the function keys are one further on from there.

Macros are phrases you type often, each behind a short label. Tapping one types the whole phrase where the caret is — `cmt` types "commit this", `psg` types "push staging" — and then stops. It never sends anything, so you can add a word, read it back, or delete it like anything else you typed.

They work anywhere the key row does: the agent chat, a terminal, a code editor, a sheet cell.

The row ships with a starting set, and they're yours to change in Settings → Appearance → Keyboard Macros — a label and the phrase it types. Keep labels to five characters or fewer, because that's what fits on the key. Eight macros fit a page; add more and they spread evenly across the pages that follow. Delete them all and the page disappears.

In a terminal

While a terminal is in Vim normal mode the row re-stocks itself, because most of the ordinary set is dead weight there. That set learns which keys you actually use. See Vim Mode for what it holds and how it decides.

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