I was frustrated by ⌘Q and ⌘W proximity for a long time. Long, long time. Seriously, long time.

It hits me the most with browsers since I usually open and close quite a lot of tabs during the day. And I tend to do it from keyboard, so sometimes I just hit ⌘Q when I only intended ⌘W.

It just happened again.

But this time I suddenly realized that I can easily remap it. I was using this OSX feature for other things, like remapping useless since the typewriter days Caps Lock key, but somehow missed that I can fix this annoying problem too.

If not universally then at least in Chrome (or any other application if needed).

This is really easy:

1. go to System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts and choose Application Shortcuts in the left panel.

   

2. click on the + icon to add another shortcut.

3. Choose Google Chrome as the application and type in exactly, including case Quit Google Chrome as Menu Title. Generally, it should be the exact menu command name in the application that you want to map.

4. Now, click inside the Keyboard Shortcut field and then press on you keyboard whatever the new shortcut you want. I chose ⌥⇧Q so that it will stay at the same place but wont be as accidentally press-able.

⌘Q will not longer work, and the new shortcut will be correctly displayed in the Chrome’s menu: