I’ve been wondering recently about the history of CTRL-W.
As a convention, it seems universal: CTRL-W closes a tab. I’ve found only one application which uses a tab-convention for different “pages” but does not accept CTRL-W to close tabs (MomentIM, a Jabber client).
Everything else I’ve seen that uses tabs, also uses CTRL-W as the shortcut to close them.
My feeling is that it inherits functionality from CTRL-W as used to close the Window. I don’t think that was necessarily a universal convention, but it is widespread. Since a tab is essentially a sub-window, from a certain perspective, it makes sense that CTRL-W would close tabs, one by one, until only the main window is left — at which point the main window could also be closed via the same mechanism.
I’m curious: can anyone recall the earliest application they’ve seen using CTRL-W? CTRL-W, and tabs? For me (tabs + CTRL-W), I believe it was Homesite and/or Mozilla, but I’m sure that it was in use as a convention prior to that.
Can anyone give us some history?
