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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?

UPDATE:
This post keeps getting visitors, so I wanted to add an update (yes, to those commentators who feel compelled to state it, this is possibly unbelievably trivial and does not really affect anything whatsoever).

I noted recently that emacs has a CTRL-w (actually CTRL-x CTRL-w, but many emacs commands are prefixed with CTRL-x), in which the W is for Write, as in, “to disk”, not for “Window”, as in “to close.” So I’d guess that the use of CTRL-w to close gui windows (and then, by extension, tabs, which are really windows inside of another window), post-dates command line tools, which rarely had even conceptual use of windows as gui elements. I don’t know how far back it dates; I’m sure it was in Windows 95, and so was probably in Windows 3.1. If so, I’d make an educated guess that it existed in the Macintosh computers of that era as well. I imagine that’s as far back as it goes, but I could be wrong.

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