TermLens popup

The TermLens popup is a borderless floating version of the docked TermLens panel for the active segment. Designed for keyboard-only term selection on small screens – and for translators who want to insert terms without ever reaching for the mouse.

When to use it

Small screens / laptops – keeping the docked TermLens panel always-visible can cost too much vertical space, especially for longer source sentences. The popup gives you the same view on demand and disappears when you’re done.
Pure-keyboard workflows – Alt+L, cycle, Enter, back to typing. No mouse, no menu hunting.

Opening and closing

Key	Action
Alt+L	Toggle the popup (open if closed, close if open)
Escape	Close without inserting
Click outside the popup	Close without inserting

You can change the key in File → Options → Keyboard Shortcuts. (Earlier versions listed Ctrl+Alt+G; that key now belongs to AutoTagger.)

Was a Ctrl tap until this version. Pressing and releasing Ctrl on its own used to open the popup – a quick gesture, but not one Studio could tell apart from any other program’s Ctrl-modified shortcut once something else had consumed the middle key. The popup opened by itself for anyone running a keyboard tool, a text expander or voice commands alongside Studio. Alt+L is unambiguous. If you preferred the tap, note that Studio remembers per-user shortcuts, so an existing installation keeps whatever you already had bound.

Cycling between matches

When the popup opens, the first match has an amber ring around its source word – that is the current match that Enter will insert.

Key	Action
Right / Tab	Move the current-match highlight to the next match
Left / Shift+Tab	Move it to the previous match

Cycling wraps: from the last match, Right takes you back to the first.

Up and Down have jobs of their own (from v18/19.20.205). Up opens the current match for editing, like E, and Down shows or hides its details, like I – see Editing a match and Showing a match’s details below. Before v18/19.20.205, Up and Down moved between matches, the same as Left and Right.

The line at the bottom of the popup lists the keys: ”← → cycle · Enter insert · ↑/E edit · ↓/I info · Esc close”.

Inserting

Key / action	Result
Enter	Insert the current match into the target segment, close the popup, return focus to the target cell
Click any chip	Insert that match into the target segment, close the popup, return focus to the target cell

Both paths share the same insertion logic – there is no difference between picking by keyboard and picking by mouse.

Editing a match

Press E – or Up (from v18/19.20.205) – while a match is highlighted to open the term-entry editor for that entry. The popup closes first so the editor opens with clean focus. The editor is the same dialogue the docked panel’s right-click “Edit Term…” menu uses, including the multi-termbase editing case for entries that exist in more than one termbase.

Showing a match’s details

Press I – or Down (from v18/19.20.205) – to show the details of the current match below its chip: synonyms, definition, domain, notes and links, the same details you see when you hover over a chip in the docked panel. Press I or Down again to hide them. The popup stays open, so you can still insert the match with Enter. Holding Down shows the details once; they don’t flicker.

Escape with the details showing hides the details first; press it again to close the popup.

Visuals

The popup uses the same chip rendering, colour scheme, and metadata indicators as the docked TermLens panel – pink for project termbase terms, blue for regular Supervertaler terms, yellow for non-translatable, green for MultiTerm. See the TermLens overview for the full colour key.

Both show the same matches for the active segment. Pick whichever fits your style:

	TermLens popup (Alt+L)	TermPicker (Alt+P, or docked)
Layout	Source segment with chips underneath each matched word	Sortable, scrollable table
Best for	Skimming matches in segment context	Many matches that benefit from sorting / typing-to-jump
Keyboard	Left / Right / Tab cycle a highlighted match; Up edits it, Down shows its details	0–9 jumps directly; Up / Down navigate
Modality	Modeless – click outside to dismiss	Modal – Escape or Cancel to close