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I want to use Control-W and Control-T to close and open tabs in OS X

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On Windows, you can use Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T to close and open tabs. On OS X, you have to use Cmd-W and Cmd-T instead (this bothers me because it is asymmetric with using Ctrl-Tab and Shift-Ctrl-Tab to navigate between tabs). Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T don't seem to do anything by default, so it would be nice if both Cmd or Ctrl could be used as a modifier for closing and opening tabs. Is there a way to accomplish this?

I tried using the System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts tab to set Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T to operate the Close Tab and New Tab menu options, but, this does not work; when I press those key combinations, the File menu briefly flashes, but nothing else seems to happen.

Thanks in advance for your help!

On Windows, you can use Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T to close and open tabs. On OS X, you have to use Cmd-W and Cmd-T instead (this bothers me because it is asymmetric with using Ctrl-Tab and Shift-Ctrl-Tab to navigate between tabs). Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T don't seem to do anything by default, so it would be nice if both Cmd or Ctrl could be used as a modifier for closing and opening tabs. Is there a way to accomplish this? I tried using the System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts tab to set Ctrl-W and Ctrl-T to operate the Close Tab and New Tab menu options, but, this does not work; when I press those key combinations, the File menu briefly flashes, but nothing else seems to happen. Thanks in advance for your help!

All Replies (4)

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Firefox does not have an option to set custom keyboard shortcuts. Maybe there is an Add-on that can help

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Thank you very much for that pointer. It sure appears to be exactly the extension I need!

However, I found that the same behavior happens with that extension as when I use System Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts to remap ^W to Close Tab and ^T to New Tab: the File menu flashes briefly when I press those key combinations, but no tab is closed or created. In addition, with this extension, the original Cmd-W and Cmd-T keybindings are totally overridden.

It seems like Firefox is somehow swallowing those key combinations. Not sure how or why.

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I have finally found a solution to this problem. The latest (currently not yet released) version of KeyRemap4MacBook (http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/) includes options to turn on exactly this behavior. Here's a link to the version that includes this new functionality:

http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/files/KeyRemap4MacBook-6.99.33.pkg.zip

If this solves the problem for you, I encourage you to make a donation to the author via the links on his website (he kindly added this feature at my request, with a one day turnaround time, wow!).

I still feel it would be good if Firefox had this functionality natively or via an extension, but, at least there is a workaround in the meantime.