Sid and I got into a discussion earlier today about keyboard shortcuts for switching to the next tab, and this chart (high-res version) was the result.
The first takeaway is how absurdly non-standardized this is… could you imagine how difficult things would be if “Next Window” or “Next Application” were this different from application to application?
Next, it seems like Cmd-} is the winner, at least on the Mac side of things. It doesn’t conflict with Tumblr’s next/previous page (and TextWrangler’s shortcuts are easily customized - unlike Firefox’s).
Finally, I’m blown away by the subconsciousness of keyboard shortcuts. I can switch tabs in all of these applications, but I was entirely unable to list any of the shortcuts from memory.
A few random notes:
* I tried to sort my chart top->bottom by frequency of use, and left->right by popularity of the shortcut.
* Safari’s support for Shift-Command-Right Arrow is very strange (it doesn’t work for empty tabs or when focus is in a text field). Gruber has a good explanation.
* While researching, I stumbled across a great page on OS X System Key Bindings (plus handy guide to defaults)
* There’s been some speculation (although I can’t seem to find a link now), that the new tabs in Safari 4 will be system-wide in Snow Leopard — and possibly available as a Cocoa control for developers to use. I’m not sure if this would solve the keyboard shortcut problem at all, but it would lead to more standardization in tab appearance + behavior.
* Making classy-looking tables is easy in Numers.
