Global keyboard shortcut to open a tab in Chrome on Mac OS X

You can run the following Terminal command (e.g. in a bash script):

open -a "Google Chrome" chrome://newtab

This will cause the application Google Chrome to open the URL chrome://newtab, thereby opening a new tab.

Unfortunately, Google Chrome doesn't register the chrome:// URL type with Launch Services, and it will think that's a file path.

To fix this, right-click Google Chrome's application bundle, select Show Package Contents, open the Contents directory and edit Info.plist in a text editor.

Search for CFBundleURLTypes. Edit the following few lines to add the lines indicated by a +:

<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
<array>
+   <dict>
+       <key>CFBundleURLName</key>
+       <string>Chrome Internal URLs</string>
+       <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
+       <array>
+           <string>chrome</string>
+       </array>
+   </dict>
    <dict>
        <key>CFBundleURLName</key>
        <string>Web site URL</string>

Save and close. Move Google Chrome's application bundle to a different directory, and back again, to make Launch Services pick up the change (if it doesn't work, log out and back in).

Then, run open like described at the beginning.

Once this works, your best option is to run a shell script that performs the open command, which in turn is invoked e.g. by your launcher. Since I believe the delay is caused by osascript loading, pretty much any solution you choose here should be fast enough.

To semi-automate the editing of the Info.plist file (you have to repeat this for all Chrome updates), you can use PlistBuddy in Terminal. First, create a file e.g. named chrome-url.plist with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
  <dict>
    <key>CFBundleURLName</key>
    <string>Chrome Internal URLs</string>
    <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
    <array>
        <string>chrome</string>
    </array>
    </dict>
</array>
</plist>

Then, you can use the following to patch Chrome's Info.plist:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Merge '/path/to/chrome-url.plist' :CFBundleURLTypes" /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Info.plist

Chrome now has support for global shortcuts built in, and I created the Global New Tab Shortcut extension to leverage it.

Install it, assign a shortcut and set the scope to Global, and you get super-fast access to the OmniBar.

You won't have to keep modifying Chrome if you send it a "get url" AppleEvent directly. Use this:

tell application "Google Chrome"
    open location "chrome://newtab"
end tell