Keyboard navigation in Flutter sounds like a solved problem until you try to add it to a real app. The framework gives you Shortcuts , Actions , and a focus tree, and on a form with a handful of fields that is genuinely enough. Then you open a chat, and the thing you want to activate is a message bubble that is not a focusable control, the list under it is reversed, an overlay is anchored to a row that may scroll away, and the user may be typing at the same time.

That is the situation in Folcadi, a language-exchange messenger with a Flutter client. This post is not a celebration of complete keyboard parity. It is a description of the model we settled on, the two rules that keep it honest, and the parts that are still mouse-only.

The first attempt was a pile of letters

The earliest version was the obvious one. Each screen got letter chords: Alt+S for Settings, Alt+M for Saved Messages, Alt+F for Feedback, and so on.…