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Is there any way to disable Command+W in the terminal?
On several occasions I have accidentally closed a terminal window containing important information when I meant to close a Safari tab and did not realize that the terminal was the active window.
To disable ⌘W in Terminal, do the following:
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From the menu in the top left corner of the screen, select System Preferences. Click on Keyboard then Keyboard Shortcuts then Application Shortcuts.
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Click the + button to add a new shortcut
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Select “Terminal.app” for the application, and for the command, type
Close Window(this is case sensitive). In the shortcut box, give it a different shortcut, like ⌘ControlW
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Now ⌘W will not close your terminal windows.
7
You can set a prompt before closing in the preferences:
Terminal Preferences → Settings → Shell
answered Mar 19, 2012 at 12:38
4
I tried all of the above, and none worked for me.
What worked was changing the shortcut for the “Close” command.
6
I propose this:
In iTerm: Open Preferences>Keys
At the bottom of “Global Shortcut Keys” click “+”, then type Cmd-W and leave the default Action “Ignore”.
- no need to manipulate global settings
- no need to confirm conscious closing
answered Sep 7, 2013 at 6:50
3
A bit of an old question but in iTerm2 this helped me:
iTerm2 → Preferences → keys → Add key mapping: “command + w” => ignore
answered Feb 20, 2018 at 10:34
1
Goto Keyboard System Preferences and select “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Then choose Application Shortcuts from the left and click +. Choose “Terminal.app” and enter a menu item that is not that critical. I chose “Bring All to Front”. Then click into Keyboard Shortcut and hit CMD+W. Click OK.
Using this technique have have successfully redirected the CMD+W shortcut in Terminal.
For iterm, as @Shwaydogg mention:
For those using iTerm go to Prefrerences -> Profiles -> Session -> Prompt before closing!
answered May 22, 2020 at 17:12
Also worth mentioning BetterTouchTool (http://www.bettertouchtool.net/)
I wanted to have both ⌘W & ⌘C both perform Copy (muscle memory, don’t ask). The native method only allows you one key per command, with BTT I was able to have both keys mapped to same command, while also avoid the undesired Close WIndow behaviour
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