FOOTMAN

Footman makes one key the Hyper key and gives it a flat set of chords: hold Caps Lock, press C, and you're in Chrome — launched if it wasn't running, or stepped to its next window if it was. Each chord focuses an app, opens a target, runs a command, or switches virtual desktop, and that's the whole product — no search palette, no window manager, no clipboard history. It replaces exactly one slice of a launcher suite, the keyboard shortcuts, and optimizes it for muscle memory.

The design is deliberately unclever: chords are flat — no sequences, layers, hold thresholds, or timeouts — so there's no state the trigger path can get stuck in, and while Hyper is held the normal keyboard is suspended (an unbound key is suppressed, not passed through, so a stray Hyper press can never type into a focused field). It's written functional-core / imperative-shell in Rust: a platform-free core library carries the logic and is checked with property tests (the invariant "nothing is ever suppressed unless Hyper is held" is proven, not sampled), behind a thin OS shell. Windows ships first — one release from v0.1 — with Linux and macOS built to reuse the same core unchanged.