Linux

The default hotkey on Linux is Alt+Space. Which of the features below work depends on whether your session is X11 or Wayland.

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE   # x11 or wayland

X11

Everything behaves as on the other platforms: the global hotkey is registered directly, paste injection synthesises a real keystroke into the focused app, and snippet auto-expansion listens through the X server’s XRecord extension.

If your X server has no XRecord extension, auto-expansion fails gracefully and the Snippets settings pane shows a banner instead. Expanding a snippet from the palette still works.

Wayland

Wayland deliberately forbids a client from observing or synthesising keystrokes in another application. That has three consequences.

Paste becomes copy. OpenRay copies to the clipboard and reports that honestly rather than pretending to paste. You press paste yourself in the target app.

Snippet auto-expansion is unavailable. Turning the toggle on shows a banner saying so. Expanding a snippet from the palette still works, subject to the clipboard fallback above.

The global hotkey goes through a portal. OpenRay binds it through org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts, which makes your compositor show its own confirmation dialog. This is the only way to get a global hotkey on Wayland at all.

No portal, or the bind dialog was declined?

Bind your desktop environment’s own keyboard-shortcut setting to launch (or re-launch) the openray binary. A second launch just toggles the existing palette instead of opening a duplicate window.

• GNOME: Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → View and Customize Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts → +. Set the command to openray (or the full path to the AppImage or installed binary), then assign your key combination.
• KDE Plasma: System Settings → Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts → Edit → New → Global Shortcut → Command/URL. Set the command to openray and bind a combination under the Trigger tab.
• sway, Hyprland, or any compositor with its own keybinding config: bind an exec-style directive to run openray.

When the portal is unavailable, OpenRay’s Settings window shows a banner pointing at this same fallback.

What is verified

App scanning, the global hotkey path, paste injection logic, and the whole Import / Export data path are covered by tests that run natively on Linux in CI. The Wayland portal round-trip and the XRecord keystroke tap have not been exercised against a real compositor or X server in this project’s sandbox. See Platform verification.