Seven 9s and 10s

High-res That’s a fair question and it was the first thing I tried to do to solve this problem. The reason it doesn’t work is because in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, you define an application, and then you assign a shortcut to a specifically titled Menu item.  So you could, for example, set “Command+1” to trigger “Select Previous Tab” and “Command+2” to trigger “Select Next Tab,” but that doesn’t solve my problem because I’m not trying to cycle through the tabs, I’m trying to target specific tabs. In order for it to work the way I want, and the way Firefox/Chrome behave, Safari would need to have menu items that say specifically: “Select The First Tab,” “Select The Second Tab,” etc., but obviously that’s just ridiculous and it will never be that way.

That’s a fair question and it was the first thing I tried to do to solve this problem.

The reason it doesn’t work is because in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, you define an application, and then you assign a shortcut to a specifically titled Menu item.  So you could, for example, set “Command+1” to trigger “Select Previous Tab” and “Command+2” to trigger “Select Next Tab,” but that doesn’t solve my problem because I’m not trying to cycle through the tabs, I’m trying to target specific tabs.

In order for it to work the way I want, and the way Firefox/Chrome behave, Safari would need to have menu items that say specifically: “Select The First Tab,” “Select The Second Tab,” etc., but obviously that’s just ridiculous and it will never be that way.

Switching tabs in Safari 4 with shortcuts, just like in Firefox

So I’ve been a big fan and heavy user of the Flock web browser for several years, but I’m finding that I’ve stopped using it’s built-in features lately and, because it’s based on Firefox 3.x and hasn’t been upgraded to the 3.5 engine, it’s become increasingly bloated and slow and I’m ready to change to something blazingly fast and simple.

I’m using Chrome at work on my MacBook Pro and I’m liking it, but unfortunately there is no PPC version of Chrome that I can run on my G5 at home and so my only alternative is to use Safari.  I’m okay with that, except that the tab-switching shortcuts for Safari are absolute crap.  “Command+Left/Right Arrow” isn’t a very efficient way to navigate your tabs.  Firefox (Flock) and Chrome both use the “Command+Number Key” shortcut, which I love and use constantly.  By default, that shortcut in Safari loads bookmarks from your Bookmarks Bar… UGH.

Then I found this great little How-To blog post that has solved the problem in just 3 easy steps.

  1. Download a tiny utility.
  2. Download some preformatted scripts.
  3. Configure the utility in 30 seconds.

Like magic… it works perfectly. Hooray!

Click here to visit the great post by Paul Kretek.