The shortcut system

Shortcuts are how you style content in Keystone. When you write a fenced div, a bracketed span or a heading with a class name, you're invoking a shortcut:

::: dialog
- Who's there?
- Just the wind.
:::

A word in [small caps]{.font style="bold"} mid-sentence.

dialog and font are shortcuts. Keystone ships a complete set of them — the system shortcuts — and you can define your own on top.

Two layers

• System shortcuts ship with Keystone and cover every built-in styling capability: font, align, figure, aside, dialog, quote, and the rest. They're always available — you don't declare them. The reference lists them all.
• User shortcuts are yours, defined in shortcuts.yaml. They build on the system shortcuts to create project-specific vocabulary — define garamond once instead of repeating font family="eb-garamond" everywhere. See Writing your own shortcuts.

How you use them

Shortcuts are written like any Pandoc class, in the forms the Markup syntax page covers in full. Most are block-level:

• As a fenced div — ::: name … ::: — for block content (paragraphs, lists, images).

Some also work inline, as a bracketed span — [text]{.name} — for runs inside a paragraph. Inline support is per-shortcut (font, dropcap, set, the conditional shortcuts, and a few others); the reference notes which. A heading takes a shortcut of your own built on container — see Headings.

Most shortcuts accept attributes that tune their behavior, written in the Pandoc attribute syntax:

::: {.font family="eb-garamond" size="large"}
A passage in large EB Garamond.
:::

Each shortcut's reference entry lists the attributes it accepts and their defaults. An attribute the shortcut doesn't recognize produces a build warning — that's typo detection, not a hard failure.

Build on the stable layer

The system shortcuts are a public promise: once a shortcut, one of its attributes or a form it renders ships, it's never removed or renamed. What counts as valid markup can tighten, only in a release marked breaking, whose changelog says what to change.

Behind each system shortcut is an internal handler whose class starts with the reserved ks- prefix (font → ks-font). Those handlers are private and carry no such promise — they can change or disappear between releases. You reach a handler through the system shortcut that fronts it, and build your own shortcuts on the system names too. The system layer absorbs internal changes so your manuscript doesn't have to.