Add the backspace key shortcut back to Safari 6
- could be very old (up to 15 years!)
- could not be accurate anymore
- could not represent the views of the author anymore
- could be in le French
Since I switched to Mountain Lion, I haven’t had a lot of issues. But some really minor differences between this new OS X version and Lion made me go crazy. A bit.
I rely a lot on keyboard shortcuts to enhance my workflow in Apps. And for a reason I still don’t understand, Apple removed the backspace keyboard shortcut to go back to the previously visited page. This shortcut works on any browser & on any OS so I don’t get why we couldn’t use that handy shortcut anymore. They were probably too busy focusing on the trial vs. Samsung 😉
I fiddled around the Safari .plist file with XCode and saw that there was still a mention of a “Back” key. As I looked more in depth, I discovered that some shortcuts were actually simply containing the shortcut keys in unicode mode. So, without any faith, I tried to tie the “Back” command to the backspace key, in unicode. And it worked! 😀
The solution
Simply copy and paste this code into terminal, no sudo required. Relaunch Safari and you will be able to use backspace to go to the previous page again.
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add Back "U232b"
I think Apple is trying to encourage use to use the swipe movements on the trackpad, which I like and use while on the go. The problem is that at the office and at home I use my laptop with an external display and keyboard so this is useless…