While editing in an input field, I’m so used to going for Ctrl+W instead of Ctrl+Backspace because it’s more ergonomic. But almost all modern browsers use Ctrl + W to close tabs. Since when was this a convention? I’d love to go back in time and git revert this change. Incredibly frustrating.
TL;DR: old man yelling at clouds.
I solved that and much more with Xremap. It’s really fantastic, fast, lightweight, and takes precedence over the key scanning of all programs. It handles also program-dependent keybindings. I managed to have Emacs-like keybindings for the whole desktop, but you could just use it to disable or remap C-w for some programs.
Thanks for the suggestion with xremap. I knew some X utils would fix this. GTK (so for some browsers) has an Emacs mode out of the box; I used to use it, but C-w was still being overridden.