Arc Tab, Archive & Window Shortcuts

Start with Cmd+T, because everything else follows from it. In Arc this opens the Command Bar: one input that accepts a URL, a search query, the name of an already-open tab, or a command such as adding a split pane. Arc works out which you meant from what you type. That single surface replaces the new-tab page, the address bar and the tab-search feature that other browsers ship as three separate things, and it is the reason Arc's interface can be as sparse as it is. Cmd+L opens the same bar prefilled with the current URL when you want to edit where you are rather than go somewhere new. Cmd+W is the binding that generates the most confusion, because the keystroke is universal and the outcome is not. The tab leaves the sidebar and goes to the Archive, recoverable through the Command Bar or the Archive view. Nothing is destroyed. This is what allows the rest of Arc's tab model to work: a browser that automatically clears your tabs on a timer would be alarming if clearing were permanent, and is merely tidy when it is not. The knock-on effect is behavioural — Arc users press Cmd+W without the hesitation the same keystroke carries in Chrome, because the cost of being wrong is one Cmd+Shift+T rather than a lost page. Pinning with Cmd+D is Arc's replacement for bookmarking, and the substitution is more thorough than it sounds. A pinned item sits in the sidebar of its Space, opens instantly, keeps its scroll position, and is exempt from every form of tidying. There is no separate bookmarks bar to maintain in parallel, and no distinction between 'a tab I have open' and 'a page I saved' — they are the same object in different states. The consequence is that Arc's sidebar becomes a working set rather than a list of everything currently loaded, which is the actual problem horizontal tab strips fail to solve once you pass a dozen tabs. Cmd+Shift+K clears every unpinned tab in the current Space at once. Arc does this automatically on a configurable timer, but the manual version is the one people reach for, because a deliberate reset at the end of a task is a different act from waiting for a clock to decide. Anyone who finds the automatic clearing unsettling has two options that are better than fighting it: extend the interval in settings, or pin more aggressively. Most people end up doing the second. Moving between tabs is Cmd+Option with the up and down arrows, with Cmd+{ and Cmd+} bound to the same actions for fingers that already know that pattern. The arrow version tends to win because Arc's list is genuinely vertical, so up and down map onto what you see. Little Arc, on Cmd+Option+N, sits slightly outside this whole model: a single frameless window holding one page, invoked from anywhere in macOS rather than only from inside the browser. It exists for the lookup that does not deserve a tab — a definition, a tracking number, a link someone sent you — and its value is precisely that it never touches the Space you were working in. Little Arc has a second role that is easy to miss: it is what opens when you click a link in another application while Arc is your default browser. Rather than pulling focus to your main window and dropping an unrelated page into whatever Space you were in, the link arrives in its own frameless window you can read and dismiss. If you decide it deserves to stay, it can be promoted into a real tab. That flow — external links landing somewhere disposable by default — solves a genuine annoyance that other browsers have never really addressed. Windows behave conventionally by comparison. Cmd+N opens a second full Arc window with its own view of your Spaces, and Cmd+Shift+N opens an incognito window that works exactly as Chromium's does. The thing worth knowing is that a second window is rarely the answer in Arc, because the problems it would solve elsewhere — comparing two pages, keeping a reference visible — are handled better by Split View, which persists with the Space instead of evaporating the moment another application takes focus. One edge case catches people out. Cmd+W on the last tab in a Space archives it and leaves the Space empty rather than closing the window, unlike Chrome, where the window goes when the final tab does. Closing the Arc window is Cmd+Shift+W. A Space is a container that exists whether or not anything is currently in it, so an empty one is a normal state rather than something to be dismissed.