Tutorial: Clear the Finder’s “Open With” Menu

Posted by Adam Fisher-Cox on 10/8/07 in Tips & Tricks, Tutorial

Tutorial A problem I have had recently is one just small enough to get under the skin. Have you ever right-clicked and selected “Open With” on an image to open it with your favorite editor only to be bombarded with a list of applications you thought you removed ages ago? Maybe even some you never knew existed? There is also the problem of duplicates.

Mac OS X seems to think that some of my applications are more useful than others by listing them twice. There has to be an easy way to fix this right?

Open With

The first thing you need to know is that the list is automatically generated by OS X. It depends on what applications you have installed, and if those applications can handle particular files. The problem is that it doesn’t update itself very often, and the list can get very bloated if not cleared out every so often. Everything is stored in a single file located in your preferences folder. Take the following steps to delete this file so the list can get a fresh rebuild.

Go to your Home/Library/Preferences folder
Find “com.apple.LaunchServices” file and trash it (you can back it up if you want)
Test it out!

There you have it. The next time you right-click on an item and select “Open With” in the Finder, only current applications will be listed. Some items may return if the application that controls them adds itself back to the list. You can delete the file again if you are having problems.

If you want to, you can create a script to automatically trash this file for you at any interval you desire. Check out this page for help doing that.

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16 Comment(s)

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Pete said on

October 8th, 2007 at 10:33 am

Great! Now how do I stop it from spinning up my external hard-drives (and pausing for the 4-6 seconds that that takes) whenever my mouse hovers over ‘Open With’ for too long?

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Arjun Muralidharan said on

October 8th, 2007 at 11:44 am

Photoshop clutters my list like hell! Anyone know how to control which items are displayed int he first place?

Bob said on

October 8th, 2007 at 1:19 pm

Are you using leopard or pre-Tiger OS X? The highlighter bar is a different shape than in Tiger.

Greg H said on

October 8th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

@Bob - I think he is running a ShapeShifter Theme.

-1

Jim said on

October 8th, 2007 at 10:54 pm

Don’t you have to at least re-start the Finder (if not completely log out)? This tip doesn’t work for me… though I haven’t tried logging out yet.

Justine said on

October 9th, 2007 at 4:27 am

Didn’t work for me either and I restared my Mac :/

Andreas said on

October 9th, 2007 at 5:05 am

Did nothing for me either, and I also did a restart. A side effect though was/is that all my apps forgot who was boss. Ie. Firefox asked if I wanted to set it as my default browser, NNW asked if I wanted to set it as default newsreader and Adium asked if I wanted to… you know the drill.

Miles Evans said on

October 9th, 2007 at 7:35 am

Apple’s word on this procedure seems exactly the same as above: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305627

Dr. Girlfriend said on

October 9th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Didn’t work for me either, but here’s a solution that will (you’ll probably have to do it again every so often):

1. Open Terminal

2. Copy and paste the following command:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

-1

Greg H said on

October 9th, 2007 at 7:06 pm

When this became a problem for me, I used Cocktail to clean it out. If this tip does not work for you, there are a few other Mac maintenance applications that will do it for you.

Simon said on

October 9th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

Did nothing for me either. I’ve had duplicates of all my apps in there for 2 years. Very frustrating. At least I now know other people have the same issue. I am too scared to do Terminal thingies.

Dr. Girlfriend said on

October 9th, 2007 at 9:26 pm

It works, Simon - it’s very easy. I just did it with no problems. I got the tip from here:

http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000643.html

While it does get rid of duplicate program entries, it doesn’t solve the other problems: there are at least a dozen droplets Adobe has crapped all over my context menu.

Lou said on

October 10th, 2007 at 8:37 am

Dr. Girlfriend is right, the tip as published above doesn’t work, but the drunkenblog command does. Deleting com.apple.LaunchServices.plist only bins your default app preferences.

There’s another added benefit that doesn’t appear to be mentioned (unless I missed it). I’ve been having trouble with finder for some time now, when trying to get the context menu in a mounted drive. Didn’t matter if it was a mounted sparseimage file, a network samba/afp share, or even a Macfusion mount. Right clicking (or CTRL-click) in the finder window (to create a new folder, for instance) caused finder to crash.

I thought it was something I’d have to live with until Leopard came out, but after using the command above (THANK YOU Dr. Girlfriend!), I forgot about this issue as I often do before 9:00 in the morning, and had created a folder and moved several things around in a sparseimage finder window before I wondered why it didn’t crash on me. Apparently this command cleaned out whatever was causing it.

So, I’m starting a OSXCleanupCmd script in my ~/bin directory. This command goes at the top, and will be run every couple months - or whenever I have weird behavior. It would be neat to find a list of potential candidate commands for such a script.

Lou

dave said on

October 10th, 2007 at 11:42 am

…an easier fix for those having problems with this tip: download the free mainmenu application, then go to cleaning and rebuild launch services…that’ll fix it up fast..

john said on

December 2nd, 2007 at 11:36 am

yea umm i need help.. lol you know when you u try to view a file and in order to do that you have to go through that open file with stuffs? well by accident i clicked use this option for everything(i dont know if i wrote that verbatim)and now it always open any file with wordpad. I really dont want this because its affecting everything such as other files for work. -.- help asap.
thanks

chimpo' said on

April 22nd, 2008 at 11:48 pm

Cocktail works fine with this issue.