What's the best way to substitute a different “close window/tab” keyboard shortcut for CTRL-w?

Question

I've looked at the "Keyboard Shortcuts" settings under System->Preferences and under the sectino called "Window Management" there is a "Close Window" setting which is mapped to ALT+F4 by default.

However that does not serve quite the same function as CTRL+w which closes a tab.

I also looked in gconf-editor to try to find where CTRL+w is defined but can't find it under the metacity/global keybindings section.

Does anyone know where this is defined and how it can be changed? I need to be able to close a tab with a single keypress. Thanks.

Answer 1

You're not finding it, because this feature is application specific. There is a general convention that CTRL+W is the close function, but it's not editable in metacity and it's not even universally applicable. In vim you type :close for example.

If you have a specific application you want to perform this action on, maybe someone will have an answer.

Update

Grawity provided an outstanding comment. There is a gconf setting that when set to true, allows the user to dynamically type a new accelerator when positioned over an active menuitem. Not all applications support this. For example there are a lot of bug reports complaining about evolution mail ignoring this flag.

If you want to do this yourself, you can open a terminal and type:

gconftool-2 -type bool -set /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels true