⌘Q is too damn close to ⌘W

However, this does become a problem in web browsers and file browsers where there are no changes to save.

Apparently in the early days of OS X the NEXTSTEP guys wanted to add a ⌘Q shortcut to Finder, which would log you out of OS X. As the story goes, some people at Apple really hated that idea, so after some lively debate they settled on ⌘⇧Q instead. (As a bonus, it's now a global shortcut, so you don't have to be in Finder to use it.)

Similar problem with web browsers. You can give it a different shortcut, or you can enable a prompt to warn when closing multiple tabs. Most people opt for the latter.

That would be an implementation problem for chrome - every other OSX application tends to properly warn you if you are about to close multiple context windows with cmd-q.

EDIT: Just researching a bit- this seems to be a conflict between the Chromium design goals and the OSX UI guidelines... the Chrome team absolutely refuses to add a warning dialog if you try to close multiple tabs, but it would be the expected behaviour on OSX.

I tend to fall on the side of OSX - part of what makes it great is UI consistency - and this is one case where Chromium is making things worse, not better.

The most precious resource is the user's time. There should be no interaction that irreversibly discards the user's work. We have fairly universal undo for editing operations; there should be just as much undo support for closing windows, tabs, or apps -- carefully constructed artifacts of the user's workflow.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fit...

Incidentally, the "@" sign, as many other characters, is on a different key on the German Mac layout. Never understood why e.g. the US layout stays the same on every system, but the German one doesn't. Good time that I switched to the US one long ago. Now I only have to fight with different ways to access umlauts…

This means that:

- When my fingers are resting on the home row, they are on keys a, o, e, u and h, t, n, s.

- When I want to close a tab in Firefox, I press d, which is left of h.

- When I want to quit Firefox completely, I press :q.

I can't remember the last time I closed a tab I didn't want to close or exited Firefox without meaning to do so. The only problem I had for a while, was that I started "record macro" with q when I meant to scroll with j - that hasn't happened for quite some time now.

I mostly only use Chromium if I am logged in on various sites in Firefox and I need to use my server as proxy to access a web service bound to 127.0.0.1 on the server (meaning that it is not publicly accessible), while also using the sites I am logged in on in Firefox. I always quit Chromium by closing all tabs, and as mentioned by others, Ctrl+w is far away from Ctrl+q.

[1]: http://vimperator.org/vimperator

[2]: http://typematrix.com/ezr2030/

[3]: http://xmonad.org/

[4]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmobar

defaults write com.google.Chrome NSUserKeyEquivalents '{"Quit Google Chrome"="@$Q";}'

I usually keep my left hand on my "home keys" when browsing (Firefox user here), in order from pinky to thumb, q-w-e-f-⌘, of which I use w, f, and ⌘ on a regular basis, and I guess that usually keeps me from mis-hitting q when I mean w, I'd actually have to push the wrong finger, which is pretty rare.

Right thumb goes on the trackpad for mouse interactions (much easier now that the MBP trackpad presses in rather than having a button), other four fingers on that hand go on j-k-l-; (⌘+j/k/l I use all the time for downloads/search/address bar, ; is wasted, of course). Scrolling is the only thing that sucks, but you can get pretty far with space/shift+space (hit space with left thumb, shift with right pinky).

If I had a problem with this, I'd probably go with the WoW shortcut for quitting, alt+command+Q, which is pretty hard to do accidentally (Double-thumb keypress? Expert move...) and doesn't tend to be bound to anything else. Command+1 seems like a bad idea because some of us are very used to Command+(number) to switch to tabs.

If you're in Private Browsing mode and this happens, you lose the whole session forever, and that just happened to me the other day. It was really frustrating. :(

However, I've pressed f1 instead of escape a couple of time so I make sure to bind f1 to escape in vim

file:///Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Shortcuts.html

I would really love to have a consistent set of shortcuts across emacs and everything else I use.

It feels awfully weird pressing Q with your ring finger.

Window/Linux users use the pinky to press ctrl, taking your hand out of the usual touch typing position, and thus making it more prone to mistakes.

for some reason i always use the finger motion/press of thumb on left ⌘-key + index finger on q key to quit things and i've never experienced the ⌘q ⌘w issue.