How to clean up your ‘Open With’ Menu

Picture 3.jpg

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.

Posted

November 17, 2007

menus, patches, performance, terminal

New Posts

New ThemeAugust 16, 2023
Can I zoom the MacBook Pro camera in a Zoom meeting?July 30, 2023
How to sync your iPad without using your iCloud dataJuly 28, 2023

Latest Comments

Till Kindschus on Why can’t I drag a contact into a group in Apple address book?September 24, 2023
Same problem, Macbook Pro 14” 2021 MacOs 13.4.1 (c) (22F770820d)
Norma on How to make a Family Feud game in KeynoteSeptember 8, 2023
How do I put the answers in and hide them when playing?
Wayne on GTD with Apple remindersAugust 16, 2023
Yes, I just used relative rage is in the last year.

Article Categories

Comments

3 responses to “How to clean up your ‘Open With’ Menu”

Andrew
November 21, 2007
Hi Wayne,
What you didn’t tell us in this tip is that it resets the default browser and default RSS reader. I have discovered those two ‘resets’ so far; I wonder what else has been reset?
Reply
george
October 14, 2008
this worked for me, but i also had to cmd+alt+escape, and relaunch Finder.
(osx 10.4.11)
Reply
soap
December 18, 2011
This article is very useful. I have used my Mac for years and did not notice my hard disk is consuming by the useless files. I followed it and cleaned my Mac. Thanks. And I tried to use MacCleaning to do this as well.
Reply