Quick Prompt & system integration

Most of Polycode lives in its main window, but several surfaces let you reach it from anywhere on the Mac: a spotlight-style Quick Prompt overlay, a global hotkey, a menu-bar item, and Siri/Shortcuts/Spotlight intents.

Quick Prompt

Quick Prompt is a lightweight overlay — an “Ask anything…” input over four routing suggestions:

• Send to consensus (N models) — submits immediately into your active session (creating one if none is open): the full fan-out + synthesis.
• Send to <primary> only — also submits immediately, constrained to a single-model reply from your primary.
• Open in new session — creates a fresh session in your active project with your text waiting unsent in the composer, focused and ready to send.
• Search past sessions — fills the sidebar search with your text and focuses it.

Type a prompt and press Return to take the highlighted suggestion (arrows move the highlight; ⌘↵ always routes to consensus; Esc dismisses). The highlight starts on Send to consensus, so Return without arrowing sends your prompt right away — the two send rows have no review step; pick Open in new session when you want the text staged in the composer instead. It’s built for capturing a question the moment it occurs without breaking flow.

The global hotkey

To summon Quick Prompt from any app, set a system-wide hotkey under Settings → Appearance → Global hotkey — “Trigger Quick Prompt from anywhere. Leave unset to disable.” It’s unset by default. Click Record, press a combo (it must include at least one modifier — Esc cancels recording), and Polycode registers it process-wide; Clear removes it. If another app already owns the combo, Polycode shows “Couldn’t register this combo — another app is already using it. Pick a different combo.” (The global hotkey is macOS-only.)

The menu bar

Turn on “Show Polycode in the menu bar” under Settings → Appearance to keep Polycode one click away even with the main window closed. It’s off by default, and the change takes effect on the next launch. The dropdown shows your active session and a few commands:

• New Prompt… — opens Quick Prompt.
• Open Main Window — fronts a window, creating one if needed.
• New Session — starts a chat in the active project.
• Settings… and Quit Polycode.

Each row prints a shortcut caption on its right (⌘⇧␣, ⌘O, ⌘N, ⌘,, ⌘Q), but those are labels on the menu items, not bindings the dropdown registers — it’s a SwiftUI panel rather than a system menu, so it installs no key equivalents of its own. ⌘⇧␣ and ⌘O in particular match nothing anywhere in the app: click the row, or set the global hotkey above, to summon Quick Prompt from the keyboard.

Siri, Shortcuts & Spotlight

Polycode registers three App Shortcuts that show up in Siri, the Shortcuts app, and Spotlight:

• “Ask Polycode” (also “Polycode prompt”) — runs your prompt through the full fan-out consensus and returns the synthesized text, honoring the same primary and fan-out preferences as the main window. It runs headless (without opening the app), so it consumes provider quota across every enabled provider just like an in-app send. It takes an optional Primary model parameter to force a particular model. (Shortcuts also lists an optional Project parameter, but headless asks currently run without file tools, so it has no effect yet.)
• “Open Polycode” (also “Show Polycode”) — brings the app forward, and can focus a session by name.
• “Search Polycode sessions” (also “Find Polycode chats”) — returns past sessions whose name matches your query, for chaining into Shortcuts automations.

Separately, your sessions are indexed in Spotlight — searching their names in Spotlight and opening a result reopens that conversation in Polycode.

Background notifications

When Polycode is in the background, it can post a notification for distinct events. Toggle each independently under Settings → Privacy → Notifications (”…Toggle each category independently. System Focus + Do Not Disturb always take precedence.”). The four categories — all on by default — are:

• Notify when a query completes (window unfocused)
• Notify when a tool awaits approval
• Notify on provider errors
• Notify when an agent loop pauses at the tool-call soft cap

Appearance

Settings → Appearance also carries a Color scheme override — Match System, Light, or Dark (Match System by default) — which applies live, app-wide.

What’s next

• Keyboard shortcuts — the in-window command catalog.
• Tools and approvals — the soft-cap pause that one of the notification categories announces.
• Getting started — install and onboarding.