Dave Metzener's Weblog

Update (3/19/10 – 3:20pm): Sorry about the formatting earlier. I am having issues with MarkDown and this blog. For some reason, I can’t get the plugin I installed to work correctly.

Command-Option-Delete ( ):

Remove topmost webpage from “Show the previous page” history

So, I came across this keyboard shortcut totally by accident while I was trying to remove podcast subscriptions from within iTunes. In iTunes, you use Command-Option-Delete to unsubscribe to a podcast and remove the files from iTunes and your hard drive.

Well, I didn’t know it at the time but Safari was my active application when I was attempting to remove a podcast. Sometimes iTunes doesn’t become the active application even if you click on it with the mouse. Not sure why that is, but I hope its a bug that is fixed when the new Snow Leopard (10.6.3) is finally released to the public.

Nothing happened in iTunes, but I noticed an update in Safari’s window. I didn’t think much about it at the moment, and attempted to delete the podcast a second time. Again, I saw an update in Safari’s window. So this time I paid attention to Safari and noticed that when I pressed Command-Option-Delete, the current webpage went away and Safari animated the page zooming back to the Top Sites page.

Well, at that point, I realized that the key sequence was actually doing something constructive. I went to a website, clicked on a few links to build up the back page history and pressed Command-Option-Delete again. This time, the browser went back to the previous page. When I looked at the back page history, I saw that one less entry was in it.

So to explain a little better, take the screen shot above that shows:

• Safari: Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts
• safari keyboard shortcuts – Google Search
• Google
• topsites://

Now I press Command-Option-Delete and the top most entry is removed and the web browser shows the Google Search results page and the back page history showing:

• safari keyboard shortcuts – Google Search
• Google
• topsites://

Press the combo again and the Google search results page goes away and the browser shows Google and the back page history showing:

• Google
• topsites://

One last time and the browser animates the Google page going back to it’s position in the Top Sites page:

• topsites://

I attempted to find this keyboard shortcut documented somewhere, but I couldn’t. So here you go. I hope you find it as useful as I have!