Fearless Firefox CTRL-W

2026-09-28

I have done this multiple times:

  1. Edit some text in firefox
  2. vim instinct kicks in
  3. Hit CTRL-W to delete word
  4. Tab closes instead!!!!

Now that’s a problem!!!

The problem also gets worse when the text editor has vim emulation, but it doesn’t emulate CTRL-W!!!

Although you can patch firefox to make it forget CTRL-W exist[1] Admist the despair I’ve found out a more elegant solution:

  1. Right click on tab.
  2. Click pin tab.

This makes the tab pinned and CTRL-W will just switch onto another tab (or do nothing if it’s the only tab), but middle click works.

I didn’t know for how long this feature has been here but anyways my sanity is saved, yay!

  1. https://www.math.cmu.edu/~gautam/sj/blog/20220329-firefox-disable-ctrl-w.html ↩

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