In OS X, I always map cmd-q to the system-wide accessibility feature for zoom in. Then change the zoom factor to 0x. It effectively neuters cmd-q.

I map CMD+Q to "Hide Others", which is pretty harmless and doesn't affect the current application.

Ah, yes. On OS X, Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W (well, their CMD equivalents) are system-wide and it drives me crazy if I hit Ctrl+Q by accident, or that devs prompt to quit because of how easy it is to accidentally press it instead of W. I'm so glad that tabs and state reload in pretty much every app I use these days...

On OS X, go to the Chrome menu, select "Warn Before Quitting". This makes it so you have to hold Cmd-Q to exit. No more accidental closing.

This should really be a global setting in OS X. I find myself accidentally hitting Cmd+Q all the time, not just for the web browser.

A while back while looking for solution to this, someone told me a way to map splat-Q to "invert video," which is a great way of training yourself out of hittig splat-Q.

For quite a few users, OSX's entire concept of "quit the currently-active application" is downright archaic.

Do you no longer quit applications in [your operating system]? What's the alternative?

Neither Windows nor Android have a (generally-used) concept of quitting an entire application at the user interface level. You can force-quit a process, but that's a rarely-used feature intended primarily for debugging purposes (and accessible through a side-channel; Process Explorer for Windows, app settings for Android). Some applications implement such a concept, but they're generally "single-window" apps, where closing their sole view is equivalent to closing the entire app (games usually fit this category).

Nowadays, you can generally trust your OS to page an app in and out and devote no resources to it if the resources aren't needed. Quitting an app is for misbehaving apps, which isn't assumed to be the common case.

Install enough RAM to run every application on your system, simultaneously, without swapping...? I guess there's that.

I am surprised Apple hasn't encouraged users to do that, come to think of it.

That's the thing... from an architecture level, a modern Mac can already handle this. The fact that an app can have zero windows open (or minimized) but can be brought to foreground to interact with an app-level menubar attached to no window can be thought of as a bit of an anti-feature, depending one one's point of view.

For my work laptop, the same ~6–8 apps are always running. No need to quit anything ever.

At home, where I do a wider variety of things (coding, photography, video stuff) I do quit apps, but there's still a baseline of ~2–3 apps (Chrome + Music + one more) that are always running, which I would guess is pretty typical for most users.

In Dvorak, CMD-T and CMD-W (K and ',' in QWERTY) are a nice middle-finger curl pair on the right hand. Far away from Q. Easily paired with a right-thumb press of CMD. Strange to remember that two of my easily most-pressed keyboard shortcuts are in different (and I'd say worse!) positions for the vast majority of people.

Here is an old Firefox bug requesting this feature. There is a browser.showQuitWarning pref, but it doesn't seem to work for me.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565567

You can also fix this with "browser.showQuitWarning = true" in about:config. It still instantly quits with only one tab open, but so would Ctrl-W.