How to clean up your ‘Open With’ Menu

Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 2:02 am. 2 comments

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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.

2 Replies

  1. Andrew Nov 21st 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?

  2. george Oct 14th 2008

    this worked for me, but i also had to cmd+alt+escape, and relaunch Finder.
    (osx 10.4.11)


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