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Is there any way to purge specific applications from the Finder's "Open With" menu? Mine is cluttered with all sorts of applications I'd never choose to open HTML files with (Word, Calibre, all sorts of undesirables; see image). I know there're various tricks to remove duplicates or uninstalled applications, but I'd just like to prune.

Failing that, is there a way to move an app higher in the list (I'd like Sublime Text 2 higher up the list), or simply to bypass the menu and open the file in the two applications I'm actually interested in opening it with (Sublime and Chrome, essentially).

Running 10.7 Lion, if applicable.

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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You can for example open /Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Info.plist and remove entries from the CFBundleDocumentTypes array. To apply the changes, run sudo touch /Applications/calibre.app/ or /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -f /Applications/calibre.app/ and relaunch Finder.

If the application is signed, it invalidates the code signature. And since 10.8 some applications like TextEdit and Chess have crashed on launch if the Info.plist has been modified.

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This might do the trick. Under ~/Library/Preferences you'll find a file called com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. This file lists the preferred applications to open with for the different formats.

Opening the file with an editor such as TextMate should let you edit the associations.

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Never say never. You can do that (albeit manually from the command line) with a CLI called lsregister - /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister. It can be used to either register launchers or unregister there. -dump will show you all the present associations, and -unregister can be used to selectively remove.

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  • lsregister -f -u /Applications/SomeApp.app/ only removes the application temporarily. The application gets registered again when it is opened.
    – Lri
    Commented Mar 6, 2013 at 18:47
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You can't do that. It used to be possible, using something like Open-With Manager, but changes in 10.7 prevented this from working. I've not seen any other hacks to do this since.

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RCDefaultApp can do it and it has a nice GUI. See this blog post for a quick explanation of how to use RCDefaultApp

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