Let people choose their push-to-talk key

[HamptonMakes]

Push-to-talk was Shift, for everyone, forever. That's a key people are already pressing all day, which is why the gesture needed a 350ms hold delay and a selection check to tell talking from typing a capital — and why it couldn't work at all for anyone whose browser or OS already spends the key.

It's now a setting.

What changed

Settings → Hold to talk — a segmented control: Ctrl+Space (new default), Shift, Option / Alt, Off. Saves on click, no save button, same shape as the Theme row. Choosing Ctrl+Space reveals a note that macOS uses it to switch input sources: if the OS eats the key the browser never sees it, and a shortcut that silently does nothing is worse than one you were warned about.

Two kinds of gesture, on purpose. A chord is nobody's accident, so it records from the press — no hold delay to sit out, no selection check, nothing to guess. A bare modifier keeps every one of the old guards, because the ambiguity that motivated them is real. off is a supported answer, not a broken state: the mic button stays and the keyboard belongs to the page again.

Existing users keep Shift. A data migration writes it into their metadata, so nobody's hands relearn anything on deploy. From here, "no preference recorded" means "arrived after the setting existed" and reads as Ctrl+Space.

The mic names its own key — a hover tooltip and the aria-label. With the shortcut configurable, the button is the only thing on the page that can tell you which one yours is. The server renders a platform-neutral version; the controller rewrites it knowing whether the key in front of this person says ⌥ Option or Alt. It's suppressed mid-take, when the button is a stop button and the status text is already talking.

Also folds the theme switcher's CSS into a shared .segmented control rather than growing a second copy of it — hence the one-line touch in nav_stimulus_spec.rb.

Notes for review

• db/schema.rb has only its version line bumped, by hand. The migration is data-only, and a real dump off this dev database picked up columns from other unmerged branches (wake_url, behavior) that don't belong here.
• The engine migration is copied into the host as db/migrate/20260820195225_..._.co_plan.rb, per the usual co_plan:install:migrations flow. It's idempotent — only users with no voice_hotkey recorded are touched.
• New coverage: the chord gesture end to end, each half of it alone doing nothing, the hotkey turned off, the tooltip naming each key, and the settings endpoint (including that an unknown key is ignored rather than stored). The existing Shift specs now set the preference explicitly, which is also a check that the non-default path still works.

Testing

Full suite green: 1577 examples, 0 failures. Also driven in a browser — the settings row, the live save, and the tooltip were checked by hand.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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