Linux @lemmy.ml lckdscl [they/them] @whiskers.bim.boats 1 yr. ago

I keep closing my browser tabs by accident with Ctrl + W

While editing in an input field, I'm so used to going for Ctrl+W instead of Ctrl+Backspace because it's more ergonomic. But almost all modern browsers use Ctrl + W to close tabs. Since when was this a convention? I'd love to go back in time and git revert this change. Incredibly frustrating.

TL;DR: old man yelling at clouds.

30 comments

CTRL + T (multiple times if needed) will reopen the last closed tab.

Problem solved
- I know, but this happens only when editing text. Tab closed = text gone.
  
  Doesn't your browser warn you about closing a tab with an active text input field in it? I get an "information you've entered may not be saved" popup.
Pretty sure that's been the shortcut since Mozilla Phoenix (now Firefox) introduced tabs in 2002 or so.
Doesn't your browser warn you before closing a tab where you have entered text in an input field?
- Yes, but that's not always the case. For example, I use Portainer to drop into the shell of my Docker containers with a "terminal UI" and that tricks me into using Ctrl + W.
- I am not entirely sure, but I think it depends on the page if it warns if text is in an input and you want to leave the page.
I don't think I've realised before that terminal word delete is also tab delete in browsers..
Pull the W-key from your keyboard.

Realistically, how often do you even use the W-key? It's practically useless as is.

(just for completenes sake: /s)
- Yeah, just use vv instead.
I solved that and much more with Xremap. It's really fantastic, fast, lightweight, and takes precedence over the key scanning of all programs. It handles also program-dependent keybindings. I managed to have Emacs-like keybindings for the whole desktop, but you could just use it to disable or remap C-w for some programs.
- Thanks for the suggestion with xremap. I knew some X utils would fix this. GTK (so for some browsers) has an Emacs mode out of the box; I used to use it, but C-w was still being overridden.
I used to have that problem with Ctrl + Q and Ctrl + Shift + W. I used AutoKey to map them to an empty AutoKey phrase.

You can also map Ctrl + W to an AutoKey script that converts it to Ctrl + Backspace:
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+<backspace>")

The difference between phrases and scripts in AutoKey is that phrases can only output dumb text (and expand some macros), whereas scripts are Python code that can do stuff with the keyboard, mouse, windows etc.

AutoKey lets you target only specific types of windows if you want, so you can additionally limit these mappings only to the browser.
- This sadly only works under Xorg
- I'll check it out, but hope it doesn't affect performance. Thanks!
  
  I'm using AutoKey scripts like that in some games to automate weird key combinations and it has a very good response time. If it's responsive enough for a game it will probably work for text editing.
(context – from the early days of MacOS, Cmd-W was close window – Windows and Linux remapped Cmd to Ctrl (instead of Super) when copying a lot of the keyboard shortcuts)
29 years here, get my first computer in 2011 after using it sometimes in my sister's house. Never used ctrl+backspace in my life and did not know it existed. Edit maybe you can try something like that? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/
- There's also Ctrl+delete which deletes the word after the cursor.
  
  Dude stop blowing my mind
vim has got to you... There's no going back.
Depending on your desktop environment you can probably overwrite what that keyboard combination does to prevent that from happening.

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