Keyboard & Status Glossary
Keyboard
- Escape closes whatever dialog is open.
- Enter / Space activates the focused element. Almost everything you can tab to is a real button, link, or form control, so this is just normal browser behavior: dashboard cards, sidebar rows, tabs, filter chips, and the co-op save picker in the migration wizard are all real buttons. For the few surfaces that aren’t (the Import dialog’s “Click to choose a server folder” drop zone), PalCommand adds the same Enter/Space activation itself, so tabbing to one and pressing a key does what clicking does.
- Tab focus always shows a visible ring. Switching views moves focus to the content column, so Space and Page Down scroll the page without clicking into it first.
- In every confirm dialog, the confirming action is the last stop in tab order, after Cancel.
Status glossary
Every status is shown as an icon or dot, a color, and a label together. Color alone never carries the meaning.
| Label | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Not installed | Gray | No install exists yet for this server |
| Installing | Amber, pulsing | SteamCMD is downloading the server files |
| Stopped | Gray | Not running. Stopped is not an error. Start it again anytime. |
| Starting | Amber, pulsing | Launching |
| Running | Green | Up and listening |
| Stopping | Amber, pulsing | Shutting down |
| Updating | Amber, pulsing | Patch-day pipeline in progress (draining, snapshotting, installing, verifying, relaunching) |
| Crashed | Red | Exited unexpectedly; PalCommand will retry |
| Crash loop | Red | Repeated crashes; auto-restart may need attention |
| Broken | Red | Won’t launch (for example, a missing executable) |
Stopping a server from inside the game, RCON, or another tool that talks to it shows as Stopped, never Crashed — PalCommand only calls it a crash when the process ends on its own with nothing having asked it to. And a server that stops responding without its process actually ending — every thread frozen, nobody able to join — is restarted automatically after a few minutes of silence, the same as a crash restart, unless auto-restart is off.
Copying values
The values worth copying are copyable, and they say so: a copy chip or a small copy button sits on
or beside them. The list is the server’s address on its page, player IDs in the Players and Banned
tables, the backup folder in the Backups policy line, the data folder in App settings, the
PalDefender config paths on the Mods tab, and the netsh command PalCommand hands you when a
firewall rule fails to apply. Clicking copies the value and shows a small confirmation toast.
Not every monospace value is a copy target. Console output, build IDs on a card, and crash exit codes are shown in mono for legibility only. They’re plain text you can select by hand. That’s also the fallback everywhere: if the clipboard write fails, which some environments block, PalCommand says so and leaves the value on screen in full.