Keyboard Shortcuts to Close, Reopen and Switch Tabs in Chrome

Reaching for the mouse to close a tab or hunt for a recently closed one adds up. Chrome has a complete set of keyboard shortcuts for managing tabs — close, reopen, navigate, jump to position, and close the whole window — and knowing them cuts most tab-management tasks to a single key press. This guide covers all of them with exact keys for Windows and Mac.

Close a Tab

Ctrl+W is the shortcut you will use dozens of times a day. It closes whichever tab is currently active. If only one tab is open, it closes the Chrome window.

Ctrl+Shift+W closes the entire window — all tabs in it, all at once. Use this with care. You cannot undo a window close with Ctrl+Shift+T the way you can undo a single tab close. The best you can do after accidentally closing a window is check History > Recently closed, where Chrome may list the session, or use Ctrl+Shift+T repeatedly to step back through recently closed tabs one by one.

On Mac, the modifier is Cmd rather than Ctrl for both shortcuts. This is consistent across all Chrome shortcuts on Mac — where Windows uses Ctrl, Mac uses Cmd.

Reopen a Closed Tab

Ctrl+Shift+T is the undo for Ctrl+W. Press it once to reopen the most recently closed tab. Press it again to reopen the tab before that. Chrome steps backward through your recently closed tabs in reverse chronological order each time you press the shortcut.

This shortcut works across the current session — tabs closed since you opened Chrome. It does not reach back into previous sessions that ended when you closed Chrome entirely.

For tabs closed in previous sessions, use the History page (Ctrl+H, or Cmd+Y on Mac). The “Recently closed” section at the top of the History page lists tabs and windows from recent sessions that you can reopen by clicking.

For a deeper look at every way to restore tabs, including after a crash or an accidental window close, see How to Reopen Closed Tabs in Chrome and How to Restore Tabs in Chrome.

Switch Between Tabs

Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs from left to right in the tab strip. Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycles in the opposite direction. Both wrap around — pressing Ctrl+Tab on the last tab takes you back to the first.

On Mac, Chrome supports both Ctrl+Tab (same as Windows) and the system-level shortcut Cmd+Option+Right Arrow (next tab) and Cmd+Option+Left Arrow (previous tab). The Cmd+Option+Arrow shortcuts are available in most Mac applications that have a tabbed interface, so they may feel more natural if you switch between browser tabs and other apps frequently.

These shortcuts are useful when you have a manageable number of tabs — say, under ten — and know roughly where the tab you want is. For larger sets of tabs, jumping by position number is more precise.

Jump to a Tab by Position Number

Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 jump directly to the tab at that position in the tab strip, counting from the left. Ctrl+1 goes to the first tab, Ctrl+3 to the third, and so on. If you drag tabs around to reorder them, the position numbers change with the new order — the shortcuts count physical position, not the order in which tabs were opened.

Ctrl+9 is intentionally different from Ctrl+8: it always jumps to the rightmost tab regardless of how many tabs are open. If you have twelve tabs, Ctrl+9 goes to the twelfth. If you have three tabs, Ctrl+9 goes to the third (which Ctrl+3 would also reach). This makes Ctrl+9 a reliable “jump to the end” shortcut regardless of your total tab count.

If you have more than eight tabs, Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 still work correctly for the first eight positions. There is no Ctrl+10, Ctrl+11, and so on — the position shortcuts stop at 8, and you use Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab or the mouse to reach tabs in the middle of a large set.

Practical use for position shortcuts

Position shortcuts work best if you pin your most-used tabs on the left. A pinned tab keeps its position and cannot be accidentally dragged out of place. If you always pin your email client as the first tab and your calendar as the second, Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 become reliable shortcuts to those apps regardless of what else you have open.

To pin a tab, right-click it in the tab strip and choose Pin.

Open a New Tab

This is the complement to Ctrl+W: Ctrl+T opens, Ctrl+W closes. New tabs open to Chrome’s New Tab page and are added to the right of the currently active tab (or after any pinned tabs).

Additional Tab Shortcuts Worth Knowing

Ctrl+Click on a link (Cmd+Click on Mac) is technically a mouse shortcut, but it is so frequently used alongside keyboard shortcuts that it belongs in any tab-management reference. It opens the link in a new background tab without switching focus away from your current tab.

Closing Tabs in Groups

Chrome’s tab groups feature lets you organize tabs with a colored label. There is no keyboard shortcut to close an entire tab group at once. To close all tabs in a group, right-click the group label in the tab strip and choose Close group. This is a mouse operation — no keyboard equivalent is built in.

Using Shortcuts in Brave, Edge, Arc, and Opera

All shortcuts in this article work in Brave, Edge, Arc, and Opera. These browsers are all Chromium-based and use the same tab shortcut set as Chrome. The Mac equivalents (Cmd instead of Ctrl) apply in the Mac versions of each browser.

Saving Tabs You Want to Return To

Keyboard shortcuts make it faster to close tabs, which creates a practical problem: it is easy to close a tab and then realize five minutes later that you needed it. A few habits that help:

Bookmark before closing. Press Ctrl+D (Cmd+D on Mac) to save the current page as a bookmark before pressing Ctrl+W. It takes less than two seconds.

Use Chrome’s Reading List. The Reading List (accessible from the bookmarks sidebar) is designed for saving pages to read later without cluttering your bookmark folders.

Search bookmarks when you can’t remember where something was. If you bookmarked a page and then closed it, finding it later depends on how good Chrome’s bookmark search is. Chrome searches by title and URL — it does not search the content of the page. Bookmend adds full-text search to your bookmarks: search by any word that appeared in the page’s content, not just the title. If you close tabs regularly and bookmark the ones you want to keep, Bookmend makes finding them later significantly faster.

Quick Reference: All Shortcuts on One Table

All shortcuts in this table are verified against Google’s official Chrome keyboard shortcuts documentation and current browser behavior as of 2026.