Pivit

The Pivit Wheel

A radial command menu at your cursor — activation modes, the eight slots, and how to choose what goes on it.

The Pivit Wheel is a radial menu of eight commands that appears at your cursor. It is for the handful of things you do so often that typing them is the slow way — snapping a window, locking the screen, opening a chat.

Press Alt+W to bring it up.

Hold or toggle

Two activation modes, set under Settings → Pivit Wheel → Activation:

  • Hold (default) — keep the shortcut held, move the mouse towards a segment, release to run it. One continuous gesture, no clicking.
  • Toggle — press once to open, again to close. Pick a segment with the mouse or the keyboard.

Hold is faster once it is in your fingers. Toggle is easier if you want to look at the wheel before deciding.

Choosing the eight

The wheel has exactly eight slots. It ships with:

SlotCommand
1Open AI Chat
2Open Settings
3Lock Screen
4Maximise Window
5Minimise Window
6Restore Window
7Close Window
8Search Internet

Change them under Settings → Pivit Wheel → Commands. Any command can go in any slot, including commands from plugins you have installed.

Positions are muscle memory. Once you know that up-left is "snap left", the wheel is faster than the command bar — but only while the layout stays put. Reshuffle it rarely.

Commands that need you to type something are a poor fit for the wheel, since there is nowhere to type. Reserve the slots for actions that fire immediately.

Turning it off

If you never use it, switch Enable Pivit Wheel off under Settings → Pivit Wheel. That releases the shortcut too, so Alt+W becomes available to whatever else wants it.

If the shortcut does nothing

The wheel listens for its shortcut at the operating system level, below individual applications, which is why it works over full-screen windows. Some applications that capture the keyboard wholesale — a few games and remote desktop clients — will still swallow it. Changing the shortcut to a combination those apps do not use is usually enough. See Shortcuts.

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