how to change the Firefox Close Tab shortcut

Table of Contents

C-w is already a highly used shortcut system-wide on my machine, so I’d like to make a different shortcut for close-tab – say, F4. How can I make this change in Firefox?

I felt the frustration of several Firefox questioners who asked the same thing and were answered as if they just didn’t know the shortcut, missing the point entirely. On Reddit, though, I receive two excellent answers. One is the easy solution, with a handy plugin that takes care of it. The other introduces a new Firefox concept, mysteriously mighty “autoconfig” files.

Resources

Original reddit question: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/kqc8g2/how_to_change_the_close_tab_keyboard_shortcut/

Plugin solution: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/select-after-closing-current/

Autoconfig solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/kilmm2/restore_ctrlshiftb_library_by_setting_configjs/

More on autoconfig power:

Tory Anderson avatar
Tory Anderson
Full-time Web App Engineer, Digital Humanist, Researcher, Computer Psychologist