Is it possible to move Quick Action from the separate tab directly to Context Menu?

Question

I am using macOS Monterey 12.4.

I've created a Quick Action and it appears in the "Quick Actions" tab inside Context Menu.

Is it possible to move it to the main Context Menu somehow? As specified in screenshot:

I've tried to enable this action in "System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Services" but it does not help. The Action is still in Quick Actions tab.

Also, I do not want to move all the Quick Actions to the main Context Menu but only the particular one.

Are there any ways to do it?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If the Quick Action was created in Automator, the following command (which edits the Workflow's Info.plist to remove the NSIconName property) makes the action show up in the main contextual menu instead of the Quick Actions submenu (at least in macOS Venture 13.1):

plutil -remove NSServices.0.NSIconName /path/to/action.workflow/Contents/Info.plist

(I do not know why this works, but discovered it because some older Quick Actions appeared in the main menu and some newer ones did not; upon investigation, the former had no NSIconName property but the latter did.)

Answer 2

Like you I find it annoying that Quick Actions can't be placed at the top level in the Finder context menu.

To put items in the context menu below "Quick Actions" requires a Finder Extension. You may be familiar with Finder Extensions added as part of an application. As well as extensions added by cloud synchronisation apps (e.g. Dropbox), I have Finder Extensions that came with apps like Graphic Converter, Keka, HoudahSpot, and others.

If your development skills are better than mine, you could write your own Finder Extension. But I suspect your skills are not (otherwise you would not be asking this question). But there is one app which will assist.

Search in the Apple Store for "finder extension" and it will list a few finder extensions (and annoyingly some that are Safari extensions). I use Context Menu (New File Menu is a subset of it) and Service Station.

Service Station provides what you need. It can be configured to add two sorts of item to the context menu below Quick Actions:

1. Applications. This is just an easy way avoiding the "Open with" submenu.

2. Scripts. This is what you need to create something similar to your Quick Action.

There is an outline of using scripts here: Scripts from Finder. But note that the screenshots have not been updated for Monterey - the added items should be between "Quick Actions" and "Services".

Here is my Context Menu for an html document:

You can see 3 applications which I might want to use to open the file plus one script - Metadata.

My Metadata is just a simple bash script which runs mdls for the file and opens the result in a Text Edit window. Nothing clever!

You can create scripts and workflows of your own, put them in ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.knurling.ServiceStation.Attendant and add to the Context Menu.

My only hesitation in recommending Service Station is that it has not been updated for over a year and the developer does not respond to his support page. But it is a really handy little utility.