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I'm switching back to Safari from Chrome. Now that I figured out how to get Safari to let me navigate tabs the way I want, only one thing remains: I want to be able to reopen my last closed tab with cmd+shift+T.

Near as I can tell, it's not a matter of making a keyboard shortcut in System Preferences, since Safari does not have a menu item for opening the last closed tab. So how else can I go about this?

(I've got one slot left available in the free version of FastScripts, so it'd be handy if there were an AppleScript solution for this.)

Ian C.
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hairboat
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4 Answers4

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Try clicking ⌘-Z (for undo).

Dori
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    Mind: blown. Never thought it'd be that simple. – hairboat Oct 06 '11 at 02:16
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    @AbbyΨ - I've long had a theory about "Using an Apple product to do something you've never done before": ① Imagine that you are a brilliant person with a deep knowledge of both technology and human factors. ② Imagine how that version of you would make that feature accessible to anyone. ③ Try whatever comes to mind. End result: It's amazing how often the process works. Try it some time! – Dori Oct 06 '11 at 02:25
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    Unlike Chrome's ⌘+shift+T, Safari's ⌘+Z can only re-open a single tab. For anything more than the last closed tab, you'll need to go through your history. – drfrogsplat Sep 06 '12 at 02:00
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    @drfrogsplat @ Dori -- It really makes you wonder which way makes more sense, accidentally closing a tab is obviously something to undo; but, though I may dislike it, browsers have become more of a platform than an application, the 'undo' should affect the content, not the browser itself. Although, in a world where webpages remained pages, not trying to be pseudo-applications, Safari's metaphor would, make more sense. – Hawken Dec 09 '12 at 16:10
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    @Hawken, to me multiple tabs are analogous to having multiple documents open at once in any other application, like a tabbed text/image viewer/editor. In Photoshop, Preview, TextEdit, etc you don't "undo" closing a file, you re-open a recent file... that's not part of the 'undo chain'. Each file has its own, independent undo chain/history. – drfrogsplat Dec 10 '12 at 01:10
  • @drfrogsplat Exactly, in fact that may be a better analogy. Though it would be interesting to have a browser treat the browsing itself as the main focus. However, in today's society that would not likely be popular, what with "WebApp"s and all. – Hawken Dec 10 '12 at 01:44
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    Just noticed that closing the last tab is not 'undoable', so it may be that Safari treats the whole window as a 'document' in this analogy. I think that's a design failure though, since there's no concept of re-opening the whole 'document' after closing it; only individual pages/tabs. – drfrogsplat Dec 10 '12 at 03:18
  • It would have been great if we can use "CMD + Z" multiple times to open last closed tab, 2nd last closed tab, 3rd last closed tab, etc – rahul286 Jun 11 '13 at 11:16
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    This, this shortcut is so freaking stupid, it drives me crazy. For example: you have tab with google drive open. Open new tab with cmd+t. Close it. Try to reopen the tab with cmd+z. What happens? You suddenly undo your last action in google drive (i.e. your current tab), because f* you! This is not "simple". This is just plain stupid from Apple to use standard cmd+z for this kind of thing. – Dalibor Filus Dec 09 '15 at 17:35
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As of macOS Sierra beta 1, ⌘ + shift + T works the same way on safari.

Reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4v07pt/command_shift_t_now_works_in_safari/

tubedogg
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barissenkal
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or you can download the app SafariTabs There is a feature that saves the tabs and you can restore them for each session. It requires SIMBL to be installed. I haven't tried it yet.

Yannis Dran
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  • Welcome to AskDifferent! Generally we like answers to explain how the linked item will help the situation. An ideal answer would link the software, list the features of the software, and explain how those features will help answer the original poster's question. – daviewales May 22 '13 at 11:20
  • thank you for informing me so, I was afraid that I would be accused for "advertising". I edited the post a bit. – Yannis Dran May 22 '13 at 12:12
  • That's OK. =D I think the general idea is that the answers are "self contained". You should be able to tell if the answer is relevant without having to click on the link. – daviewales May 22 '13 at 13:37
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    Incidentally, I'm not sure this plugin does exactly what the OP wanted. He wanted to be able to open the last closed tab, but I think this plugin just enables the option to open all tabs from the previous session, which is already an option in Safari 6. – daviewales May 22 '13 at 13:40
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    ah, jeez, you are right.. :s – Yannis Dran May 23 '13 at 12:42
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If you are using Keyboard Maestro you could emulate the Chrome behaviour (including multiple undos) with a HotKey trigger. I did an initial run at it. Thats the gist of it.

(Keep in mind, that you're loosing the history in each tabs. Its really only to get the URLs back.)

wrtsprt
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