Support standard tab navigation key shortcuts on macOS

[matthewrk]

macOS has OS wide shortcuts for navigating to the previous/next tab of:

cmd+shift+[
cmd+shift+]

Surprised to see that these don't work in VSCode. This was mentioned in #9333 but implemented as API commands and #8234 comes close but neither get all the way to making it standard for macOS or even making it an option for keybindings.json (as far as I can tell). Would be great for this to be supported.

[bpasero]

Sounds like a good area for a Pull Request 👍

[bpasero]

Looks like we cannot do this because this keybinding is already taken by editor folding.

[matthewrk]

These are the standard os wide shortcuts for switching to the left/right tab, so on macOS any users who tried this would find it a little jarring if VSCode did nothing or worse something different altogether such as editor folding. Would that be a sufficient argument for remapping? Difficult territory I know.

[bpasero]

@alexandrudima and @aeschli should chime in why those keybindings got picked, they might as well be THE standard keybindings for folding, so it is a tough call.

[matthewrk]

In comparison to other code editors, I can confirm that Atom, Sublime Text 2 and IntelliJ IDEA (with mac style bindings enabled) all use this shortcut for moving left/right a tab.

That's in addition to any standard Mac app that has tabs; Safari, Terminal, Finder, Messages etc.

[alexdima]

@aeschli knows

[kidoman]

I would like to chime in here as well.

I have come from a big line of cult Mac OS X editors; TextMate, Sublime Text, and now VSCode.

The most jarring thing for me has been not being able to use Cmd+1,2,3 to switch tabs (guess what it probably works this way in your current browser if you are using Mac OS X to browse to this page, it does in Chrome for Mac OS X) and lot of other standards defined by the other editors not being followed in VSCode (or working imperfectly).

Although VSCode has now become my daily driver, it not respecting the lay of the land is continuing to be off putting #WhenInRome

[bpasero]

@kidoman agree, but it is also hard to change something that has worked in one way for a long time. we did not have tabs from day 1 and so Cmd+1 means something else in VS Code and many users might have gotten used to that.

You can always change keybindings easily, however I think what we need to do is provide a way for users to just say "I want Sublime keybindings" and you get it.

@waderyan fyi for this topic

[matthewrk]

@bpasero Is there a way to manually rebind this currently using the json config file? I thought it wasn't exposed as an option.

+1 on the idea of enabling default sets of keybindings, IntelliJ IDEA does something similar (see attached screenshot). However its worth re-emphasising that this isn't "Sublime style" its a native macOS style, every app that I've tried with tabs supports this, code editors or otherwise. So perhaps better to name this preset "macOS Native" rather than "Sublime", if it were to have a name.