Hermes Desktop Enter Swap Plugin

A Hermes Desktop plugin that swaps the composer's two Enter keys.

Key	Stock	With this plugin
Enter	send message	insert a line break
Shift+Enter	line break	send message

Everything else keeps working: Cmd/Ctrl+Enter still queues a follow-up mid-turn, Enter inside the @ / / completion drawer still picks the highlighted item, and IME composition is untouched.

It also offers:

• Command to Diagnose if not working
• Command to Toggle it ON/OFF on the fly (app restart persistent)

Install

Drop the enter-swap/ folder into your Hermes desktop-plugins folder. The location varies from system, simplest way to locate is going into the app settings > Plugins and click on the open folder button.

The folder name must stay enter-swap - it has to match the plugin id.

The app watches that directory and loads the file within a few seconds. If nothing happens, open the palette and run Reload desktop plugins. Then check Settings → Plugins shows "Enter / Shift+Enter swap".

Renderer-only: no gateway restart, no config.yaml change, no Python backend.

Turning it off

• Temporarily: Cmd/Ctrl+K → Toggle Enter / Shift+Enter swap. Persists across restarts.
• Properly: Settings → Plugins → switch it off.
• Permanently: delete the folder.

Check whether you still need this

Hermes core marks composer.send (enter) and composer.newline (shift+enter) as read-only in apps/desktop/src/lib/keybinds/actions.ts, so the Shortcuts panel can't rebind them - that's the only reason this plugin exists. There's an open upstream request to make them rebindable. If your version lets you remap these in Settings → Shortcuts, use that instead of this.

This is a hack

There's no supported API for the swap. COMPOSER_AREAS - the composer's plugin surface - states in its own header that core keeps ownership of the transcript, input, and submit engine; the seams augment the composer, they never replace it. Middleware can rewrite a draft, but it can't rebind a key.

What the plugin does instead: a capture-phase keydown listener on the composer editor, ahead of React.

• plain Enter → swallow the event, document.execCommand('insertLineBreak'). Real beforeinput/input events, so the app's draft sync and undo history stay correct - manual DOM surgery would break both.
• Shift+Enter → swallow it, re-dispatch a synthetic plain Enter behind a re-entrancy flag, so core's own submit path runs untouched. That matters: enter is bound to both composer.send and composer.steer, and which fires depends on your settings. Reimplementing submit would silently discard that.

Survives an app update: It lives in $HERMES_HOME, outside the app bundle, and your enable/disable choice is remembered.

What can break at any moment: the behavior. It depends on two internal DOM contracts - the composer-rich-input and composer-completion-drawer slot names - and on plain-Enter-keydown remaining the send trigger. If a release changes those, the swap stops and you get stock Enter=send back. It never leaves the composer broken: there's a structural selector fallback, and if nothing matches it warns once and does nothing.

Verified against v0.19.0 (2026.7.20) on Windows.

If it doesn't work

Cmd/Ctrl+K → Diagnose Enter / Shift+Enter swap. It reports which selectors matched and which composer-* slots exist in your build, as a toast and in the renderer console under [enter-swap] probe. Open an issue with that output.

Security note

A Hermes disk plugin is evaluated in the renderer with full app authority - the gateway RPC door, storage, navigation. That's true of every disk plugin, by design, because a local file could already run code on your machine. plugin.js is ~200 lines with comments. Read it before you install it.