How to clean up your 'Open With' Menu

Nov 17

How to clean up your ‘Open With’ Menu

performance, menus, patches, performance, terminal Add comments

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.

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

Andrew says:
November 21, 2007 at 1:19 pm
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?
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george says:
October 14, 2008 at 5:09 am
this worked for me, but i also had to cmd+alt+escape, and relaunch Finder.
(osx 10.4.11)
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soap says:
December 18, 2011 at 10:32 pm
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.
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