Signal Call Controls & Media Shortcuts

Take the inversion seriously if you use both platforms. Starting a voice call is Ctrl+Shift+C on macOS and Alt+Shift+C on Windows and Linux. Video is Ctrl+Shift+Y and Alt+Shift+Y respectively. Answering, declining and ending follow the same split. Everywhere else in Signal, macOS gets Cmd where Windows gets Ctrl, exactly as expected — this group alone breaks the pattern, and it has to be learned per platform rather than derived from one. The two shortcuts that are identical everywhere are the two you need most. Shift+M toggles your microphone and Shift+V toggles your camera, on both platforms, with no modifier gymnastics. These are worth having in muscle memory before you need them, because the moment you need them is the moment you least want to be hunting for a button — a dog barking, someone walking into frame, a colleague asking you a question mid-call. Answering splits deliberately into two bindings. Alt+Shift+V answers an incoming video call with your camera on; Alt+Shift+A answers without video. That distinction saves the familiar scramble of connecting to a video call and then immediately reaching for the camera toggle while everyone watches you do it. The video variant applies only to calls that were placed as video calls. Declining and ending are separated too — Alt+Shift+D declines an incoming call, Alt+Shift+E ends one in progress. Keeping them apart means the key that hangs up on a live conversation is not the same one you press reflexively to dismiss a ringing notification, which is the sort of adjacency that produces genuinely awkward mistakes. Shift+P maximises the call preview, the small window showing your own camera feed. Minor, but useful for checking framing and lighting without leaving the call or opening another application to look at yourself. Media handling is the other half of this group and follows Signal's more usual conventions. Ctrl+Shift+M opens All Media for the current conversation, showing every photo, video and file in one dated grid. This replaces scrolling a long history looking for an image someone sent months ago, which is one of the more tedious things a messaging app asks of you. Inside the resulting viewer, Ctrl+S saves whatever you are looking at. Three separate pickers have three separate bindings: Ctrl+Shift+J for emoji, Ctrl+Shift+O for stickers, Ctrl+Shift+G for GIFs. Keeping them distinct is sensible given how differently they are used, though it does mean three combinations to remember rather than one interface to navigate. All three insert into the composer, which distinguishes them from Ctrl+Shift+E — that one reacts to a selected message instead. Preferences on Ctrl+, follows the platform convention and is where audio and video device selection lives. Worth opening before a call rather than during one: discovering that Signal is using the wrong microphone is a problem best solved in advance, and the settings are not reachable from within an active call as conveniently as you would hope. A final note for anyone building keyboard habits here. Signal publishes separate PDF reference cards for Windows/Linux and for macOS rather than one combined sheet, and this section is exactly why. The divergence is real enough that a single cross-platform card would be misleading. There is a practical consequence to the Alt-versus-Ctrl split beyond simply remembering two sets. On Windows, Alt combinations are conventionally reserved for menu access, and some window managers and remote-desktop tools intercept them before an application sees them. If the calling shortcuts appear dead on a Windows machine — particularly over a remote session or inside a virtual machine — that interception is the likely cause rather than anything in Signal. The in-call buttons remain available, and Shift+M and Shift+V for microphone and camera use no Alt at all, so the two controls that matter most during a call are the least likely to be caught by something in the middle. It is also worth being clear about which of these work outside the Signal window. They do not: these are application shortcuts, not system-wide hotkeys, so muting yourself with Shift+M requires Signal to have focus. During a call where you are reading a document or looking at a shared screen in another application, the keystroke will go to whatever you are actually looking at. That is the standard behaviour for a desktop application and it is not a Signal limitation as such, but it does mean the mute button on screen remains the reliable option when your attention is elsewhere — which is precisely when you are most likely to need it. Finally, a word on what is not here. Signal has no keyboard shortcut for starting a group call as distinct from calling a group conversation, no binding for raising a hand, and nothing for switching camera or audio device mid-call — those remain mouse-driven through the in-call interface and Preferences. The shortcut set covers the actions that are urgent, which is a defensible scoping: mute, camera, answer, decline, end. Everything left out is something you can reasonably take a moment over, and everything included is something you might need in the second before you can think about it.