How to switch between tabs on Mac: one shortcut for every app

Most people learn one way to switch between tabs on a Mac — clicking them — and then wonder why their browser feels slow. Tabs aren't really a browser feature on macOS; they're a system feature, and Apple gave them a single shortcut that works nearly everywhere. Once that's in your fingers, the per-app extras are a small amount of extra memory for a large amount of speed.

The one shortcut that works everywhere: Control-Tab

Apple's own documentation for app tabs is blunt about it: press ⌃⇥ to go to the next tab, ⌃⇧⇥ to go to the previous one. Not Command — Control.

That pair works in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Finder, Terminal, Mail, TextEdit, Notes, Pages, and most third-party apps that adopted the system tab bar. If you learn nothing else here, learn those two. They are the closest thing macOS has to a universal tab key, and they cost you nothing in the apps that don't have tabs.

The catch is that ⌃⇥ is sequential. It walks left to right, one tab at a time, wrapping at the end. With four tabs that's fine. With twenty-eight it's a scrolling exercise — which is where the per-app shortcuts start to earn their keep.

The per-app shortcuts worth adding

App	Next / previous tab	Jump to a tab	Find a tab
Any app with tabs	⌃⇥ / ⌃⇧⇥	—	—
Safari	also ⇧⌘] / ⇧⌘[	⌘1–⌘8, ⌘9 = last tab	⇧⌘\ Tab Overview
Chrome	also ⌥⌘→ / ⌥⌘←	⌘1–⌘8, ⌘9 = last tab	⇧⌘A Tab Search
Finder	also ⇧⌘→ / ⇧⌘←	—	—
Terminal	⌃⇥ / ⌃⇧⇥	—	—

Two things are worth pulling out of that table.

⌘9 is not "the ninth tab." In both Safari and Chrome it means the last tab, however many you have open. That makes it genuinely useful: park the thing you keep coming back to at the far right of the tab bar and it has a permanent, one-chord address.

Tab Search and Tab Overview are the real answer to tab sprawl. ⇧⌘A in Chrome and ⇧⌘\ in Safari both let you type a few letters of a page title and jump straight to it. If you routinely run more tabs than you can read the titles of, these two beat every cycling shortcut in this article.

Safari's number shortcuts are off until you turn them on

This one catches people out. In Safari, ⌘1 through ⌘9 open your first nine Favorites by default — not your tabs. Pressing ⌘3 expecting the third tab and landing on a bookmark instead is the usual first experience.

The fix is one checkbox: Safari → Settings → Tabs → "Use ⌘-1 through ⌘-9 to switch tabs." Turn it on and the numbers address tabs the way they do in Chrome. Leave it off and you keep the Favorites behaviour. There's no wrong answer — just decide which one you want your fingers to expect, because the two are mutually exclusive.

Tabs aren't just for browsers

Finder has had tabs for years and most people never open one. ⌘T adds a tab to the front Finder window; ⌃⇥ and ⇧⌘→ move between them. One Finder window with four tabs — Downloads, Desktop, a project folder, a scratch folder — replaces four windows you'd otherwise be hunting for half an hour later.

A gotcha specific to Finder: ⇧⌘T shows or hides the tab bar there, rather than reopening a closed tab the way it does in a browser. Same chord, different job.

For document apps there's a system-wide switch that decides whether new documents become tabs or windows at all: System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Windows → "Prefer tabs when opening documents," with three options — Always, In Full Screen, Never. Set it to Always and TextEdit, Pages, Numbers and friends stop scattering windows across your screen. When you do want a separate window, ⌥⌘N overrides the preference for that one document.

Turn a pile of windows into tabs in one command

Probably the most underused command in macOS: with several windows of the same app open, choose Window → Merge All Windows. Every window becomes a tab in one window. Six Finder windows become one; a scattered set of TextEdit documents becomes one tabbed document.

It has no default shortcut, which is likely why nobody uses it. You can assign one yourself in System Settings in about thirty seconds, and then window sprawl becomes something you can undo with a keystroke. One caveat from Apple: if an app has more than one kind of window — Mail's viewer versus a new message — only windows of the kind you're currently in get merged.

Where tab shortcuts stop helping

Every shortcut above is scoped to the window in front. ⌃⇥ cycles the tabs of the frontmost window and nothing else. So the moment your day looks like three Chrome windows, a Finder window and a terminal, the tab layer can't answer the question you're actually asking, which is "get me back to the thing I was looking at four minutes ago."

That's a window problem, and macOS is thin here. ⌘⇥ switches apps, not windows — it gets you to Chrome, then leaves you to work out which Chrome. ⌘` cycles the current app's windows, but only within that one app. Neither gives you a most-recently-used list across everything you have open. So it's worth knowing which of the two problems you have before reaching for a tool: if the thing you want is a tab, use Tab Search; if it's a window, none of the shortcuts above will help.

For the window half, Let's Switch is our answer to it: hold ⌥⇥ and you get a live preview of every open window, most recent first, across every app and monitor — so the window you were just in is always one tap away. ⌥` cycles one app's windows the same way. That part is free, permanently. Pro ($9.99, paid once, no account) adds an ⌥Space search palette for fuzzy-finding a window by name when you have too many to flip through at all — the same idea as Chrome's Tab Search, one layer up.

Frequently asked questions

What is the shortcut to switch between tabs on a Mac? ⌃⇥ for the next tab and ⌃⇧⇥ for the previous one. It's Apple's system-wide tab shortcut and works in Safari, Chrome, Finder, Terminal and most apps with tabs.

Why doesn't Command-1 switch tabs in Safari? Because Safari uses ⌘1–⌘9 for your Favorites unless you enable Safari → Settings → Tabs → "Use ⌘-1 through ⌘-9 to switch tabs." Chrome maps them to tabs by default.

How do I jump to the last tab? ⌘9, in both Safari and Chrome. It goes to the rightmost tab regardless of how many are open.

Can I switch tabs across different windows? No — tab shortcuts only reach the frontmost window. Chrome's Tab Search (⇧⌘A) does search tabs across all your Chrome windows, but to move between the windows themselves you need ⌘` or a window switcher.

How do I combine my open windows into tabs? Window → Merge All Windows, in any app that supports document tabs. It has no default keyboard shortcut, but you can add one.