The reason that the hats are always present is that the way to code faster by voice than be keyboard is to speak fluently, minimising pauses, the way we speak regular human languages. If we had to say a command and then wait for the hats to appear, that would break the chain.

Re mapping, we use something called the "Command server", which allows us to use file-based RPC to run commands in VSCode. That way it is easy to send more complex commands, which are required by Cursorless

IntelliJ support is definitely one of the most requested features; once I'm done rewriting some of the core engine I'll probably take a swing at that. Here's the issue that tracks extracting cursorless into a node.js server so that it can be used by other editors: https://github.com/pokey/cursorless-vscode/issues/435